I have seen a water-colour drawing made by a great-aunt of mine, Miss Marianne Snow, of Belmont, near Exeter, of Torquay before it was “invented” and turned into a fashionable winter residence and watering-place. It was a quiet fishing-village, consisting of a few cottages, under richly wooded hills.
In one of these cottages, at the close of the eighteenth century, at the time when this water-colour was made, lived a sailor named Robert Bruce.
Bruce is not a Devonshire name, and we may shrewdly suspect that he was a Browse, and that his shipmates called him by the better-known Scottish name, which sounds almost identical with Browse. The Browses formed a considerable clan about Torquay and Teignmouth. But whether of Scotch origin or not, he was a native of Torquay. When he reached the age of thirty he became first mate of a ship sailing between Liverpool and St. John, New Brunswick. On one of these periodical voyages westwards, after having been at sea six weeks, and being near the Banks of Newfoundland, the captain and mate, after having taken an observation, went below into the cabin to calculate their day’s work.
The mate, Robert Bruce, absorbed in his reckonings, which did not answer his expectations, had not noticed that the captain had risen and left the cabin as soon as he had completed his calculations. Without raising his head, he called out, “I say, cap’n, I make the latitude and the longitude to be so-and-so. Not what it ought to be. What is your reckoning?”
As he received no reply, he repeated the question, and glancing over his shoulder and seeing, as he supposed, the captain figuring on his slate, he asked a third time, and again without eliciting a reply. Surprised and vexed, he stood up, and to his inexpressible astonishment saw that the seated man, engaged on the slate, was not the captain, but an entire stranger. He noted his features and his garments, both wholly different from those of his superior officer. At the same moment the stranger raised his head and looked him full in the eyes. The face was that of a man he had never seen before in his life. Much disturbed, he slipped up the ladder, and seeing the captain, went to him, and in an agitated voice told him that there was a total stranger in the cabin, at the captain’s desk, engaged in writing.
“A stranger!” exclaimed the captain. “Impossible! You must have been dreaming. The steward or second mate may have gone down for aught I know.”
“No, sir; it was neither. I saw the man occupying your arm-chair. He looked me full in the face, and I saw him as plainly as I see you now.”
“Impossible!” said the captain. “Do you know who he is?”
“Never saw the man in my life before—an utter stranger.”
“You must be gone daft, Mr. Bruce. Why, we have been six weeks at sea, and you know every man Jack who is on board.”