Cornish Characters and Strange Events

by S. Baring-Gould

The same fate befell the Eagle and the Romney. The Firebrand was likewise dashed upon the rocks and foundered; but the captain and four-and-twenty of his men saved themselves in a boat. And Captain Sansom, who commanded the Phœnix, being driven towards the shore, was forced to abandon his ship to save his men. The Royal Arms was saved by great presence of mind in both Sir George Byng and his officers and men, who in a minute, on perceiving the rocks not a ship's length to leeward, as well as those on which Sir Cloudesley Shovel was lost, set her topsails and sheered off. Nor had Lord Dursley, commanding the S. George, a less fortunate escape; for his ship was dashed upon the same reef as that on which the Association had been wrecked; but the same wave that beat out the lights of Sir Cloudesley's vessel lifted the S. George and floated it away.

A story has remained deeply engraved in the minds of the men of Scilly to the present day. It is to this effect:—

On the 22nd October, that same fatal day, a sailor, a native of Scilly, ventured to approach the admiral and tell him that he was steering too far to the northward, and that unless the course of the fleet was changed they could not fail to run her upon the rocks. For this act of insubordination Sir Cloudesley ordered the presumptuous adviser to be hanged at the yard-arm of his ship, the Association; and the only favour granted him, in mitigation of his punishment, was a compliance with the poor fellow's request that, before execution of the sentence, he should be allowed to read a portion of Scripture. The prayer granted, he read the 109th Psalm in which occur the imprecations: "Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.... Let his posterity be destroyed, and in the next generation let his name be clean put out. Because his mind was not to do good, but persecuted the poor, helpless man, that he might slay him that was vexed at the heart."

The report of this atrocious act could have been communicated by only one man who was said to have escaped alive out of the crew of the Association. Now happily we know that no man was saved out of that vessel. The one man who was saved was George Laurence, quartermaster of the Romney, a North-countryman from near Hull, and a butcher by trade. Of him we learn something from the account of Mr. Edmund Herbert, Deputy Paymaster-General of the Marine Regiments, who was in Scilly in 1709, sent there with the object of trying to recover some of the property lost in the wreck, which had taken place two years before.

This fellow, says Herbert, was "a lusty fat man, but much battered with the rocks. Most of the captains, lieutenants, doctors, etc., of the squadron came on shore and asked him many questions in relation to the wreck, but not one man took pity on him, either to dress or order to be dressed his bruises, etc., whereof he had perished had not Mr. Ekins, a gentleman of the island, charitably taken him in; and a doctor of a merchant ship then in the road under convoy of Southampton searched his wounds and applied proper remedies."

Now it is obvious that this man could say nothing relative to what had happened on the Association. But we arrive at the origin of the story from what Herbert relates, and he alone. He says: "About one or two after noon on the 23rd (22nd) October Sir Cloudesley called a council and examined the masters what latitude they were in; all agreed to be in that of Ushant, on the coast of France, except Sir W. Jumper's master of the Lenox, who believed them to be nearer Scilly, and that in three hours (they) should be up in sight thereof. But Sir Cloudesley listened not to a single person whose opinion was contrary to the whole fleet. (They then altered their opinion and thought themselves on the coast of France, but a lad on board the ---- said the light they made was Scilly light, though all the ship's crew swore at and gave him ill language for it; howbeit he continued in his assertion, and that which they made (to be) a sail and a ship's lanthorn proved to be a rock and the light afore mentioned, which rock the lad called the Great Smith, of the truth of which at daybreak they were all convinced.)"

This is the small egg out of which so large a fable has hatched forth. The boy was probably drowned, and his parents or relations on Scilly, angry that his advice had not been taken and so the wreck avoided, felt resentment against Sir Cloudesley on this account, and little by little magnified the incident, and transmuted it from an error of judgment into a crime.

Beside Sir Cloudesley on board the Association were Lady Shovell's two sons by her first husband, Admiral Sir John Narborough. These were Sir John Narborough, Bart., and his brother James; Edmund Loader, the captain; also a nephew, the son of her first husband's sister; Henry Trelawny, second son of the Bishop of Winchester; and several other young gentlemen of good family.

After that Sir Cloudesley had adopted the prevailing opinion that the squadron was off Ushant; he detached the Lenox, La Valeur, and the Phœnix for Falmouth, with orders to take under convoy the merchant vessels waiting there bound eastward. These ships, following a north-easterly course, as had been determined on, soon found themselves among the myriad rocks and islets that lie to the south-west of the Scilly group, where the Phœnix sustained so much damage that her captain and crew only saved the ship and themselves by running her ashore on the sands between Tresco and S. Martin's Islands. The Lenox and La Valeur were fortunately able to beat through to Broad Sound, an anchorage to the west of the principal islands, where they remained till break of day on the ensuing morning. Then they discovered where they were, and sailed for Falmouth, in the direction in which they now knew that it lay, and arrived there on the 25th, bringing news of the wreck of the Phœnix, but knowing nothing of the mishap to the vessels of the squadron from which they had been detached.

J. Addison, in a letter dated October 31st, 1707, wrote: "Yesterday we had the news that the body of Sir Cloudesley Shovel was found on the coast of Cornwall. The fishermen, who were searching among the rocks, took a tin-box out of the pocket of one of the carcasses that was floating, and found in it the commission of an Admiral, upon which, examining the body more closely, they found it was poor Sir Cloudesley. You may guess the conditions of his unhappy wife, who lost, in the same ship with her husband, her two only sons by Sir John Narborough."