Cornish Characters and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

Captain Lake was possibly suffering from what would now be termed a "swollen head." His father, a gallant officer, but of no great descent, for his services in the Maharatta war had been created Baron Lake of Delhi and of Aston Clinton, Bucks, in 1804, and had received thanks for his services by both Houses of Parliament. His elder brother had married the sister of Charles, Earl of Whitworth, and his father had been granted an augmentation of arms, a fish naiant in fesse, to represent the fish of the Great Mogul, pierced with shafts.

Lake was a hot-headed man, and he had just dined. That he intended to commit an act of barbarity is far from the truth. Jeffery was a nuisance of which he desired to free the ship, and the opportunity offered, and he took advantage of it without stopping to inquire what was the nature of the island on which he left the young man.

On reaching the Leeward Islands, where Sir Alexander Cochrane was in command of the squadron, that officer heard of what Lake had done, promptly reprimanded him, and ordered him to return to Sombrero and fetch off Jeffery.

On February 11th, 1809, the Recruit anchored off the island, and her officers landed and searched it over, but neither Jeffery nor his body could be found. A pair of trousers and a tomahawk handle were the only vestiges of humanity discoverable. The island, however, abounded in turtle and wild birds and their eggs, but the water was brackish.

For eight days, in fact, Jeffery had wandered over the hump of rock and sand that constituted the islet of Sombrero, and lived on limpets and eggs, and drunk the water collected in fissures of the rock. He does not seem to have been given flint and steel, and the means of making a fire, so that he could not feast on turtle and puffins; but, indeed, there were no trees, consequently hardly any fuel available for cooking a dinner.

He saw several vessels pass, and indeed Sombrero was in the track of merchant vessels, but he failed to make them observe his signals. At length, on the morning of the ninth day, the schooner Adams, of Marblehead, Massachusetts, John Dennis master, came to the island and took the fellow off, and landed him at Marblehead, where he worked at a forge. Little conscious that he was like to be made political capital of and to become of consequence, he did not even trouble to write home to Polperro to announce his safety and his whereabouts.

Sir A. Cochrane was satisfied that the man could not have died on Sombrero, as his body was not discovered, nor was he likely to die on an island abounding in turtles and eggs; he concluded that he had been carried away by one of the many ships that passed. He convinced himself that Captain Lake had been guilty of an illegal act, but had not desired to do one that was cruel, and he hoped that the matter would be forgotten after he had administered a reprimand.

But the story got about. It reached England. A busybody, Charles M. Thomas, who had been purser on board H.M. sloop Demarara, but had been imprisoned on suspicion that he had defrauded the Government, wrote home to Mr. C. Bathurst, brother of the M.P. for Bristol, to this effect: "I deem it a duty I owe to humanity, to inform you that Captain Lake, when commander of the Recruit, set a man belonging to that vessel on shore at Sombrero, an uninhabited island in the Atlantic Archipelago, where he died through hunger, or otherwise, for more was never heard of him. This was known to Sir A. Cochrane, who suffered this titled murderer to escape, and he is now in command of the Ulysses." The letter was dated March 24th, 1809, more than a year after Jeffery had been left on Sombrero. Its purport was obvious enough. Thomas wanted to be revenged on Cochrane for looking into the matter of his alleged frauds.

The fat was now in the fire. Sir Francis Burdett took the matter up, the Radicals throughout the country made immense capital out of the starving to death of a poor seaman by a member of a noble family. The case was kept perseveringly before the public, so that the Government was constrained to issue orders for a strict inquiry to be made as to whether Jeffery was still alive or dead.

Presently an account was received, purporting to be by Jeffery, giving information relative to his rescue and his condition in America; but as to this was appended a cross for his signature, whereas Jeffery was known to have been able to write, the public were led to suspect that this was a fabrication contrived by Lake's relatives and friends.