“Why, your honour, the case was this. Our people had a landing down at Melhuach, in Johnnie Mathey’s hole; and Parminter and his dog found it out. So they got into the cave at ebb tide, and laid in wait; and when the first boat-load came ashore, just as the keel took the ground, down storms Parminter, shouting for Satan to follow. But the dog knew better, and held back, they said, for the first time in all his life: so in leaps Parminter smack into the boat, alone, with his cutlass drawn, but”—with a kind of inward ecstasy—“he didn’t do much harm to the boat’s crew.”
“Why not?”
“Because, your honour, they chopped off his head on the gunwale.”
Near Tonacombe Cross is a stone called the Witan-stone. To that Tristam one day guided his master, the vicar.
“And now, your honour,” he said, “let me show you the wonderfullest thing in all the place, and that is the Gauger’s Pocket.” He then showed him, at the back of the Witan-rock, a dry secret hole, about an arm’s-length deep, closed by a moss-grown stone. “There, your honour,” said he, with a joyous twinkle in his eye, “there have I dropped a little bag of gold, many and many a time, when our people wanted to have the shore quiet, and to keep the exciseman out of the way of trouble; and then he would go, if he were a reasonable officer; and the byword used to be, when ’twas all right, one of us would meet him, and say: ’sir, your pocket is unbuttoned’; and he would smile, and answer: ‘Ay, ay! but never mind, my man, my money’s safe enough.’ And thereby we knew that he was a just man, and satisfied, and that the boats would take the roller in peace; and that was the very way it came to pass that this crack in the stone was called evermore the Gauger’s Pocket.”
In former times, when a ship was being driven on the rocks on Sunday, whilst divine service was going on, news was sent to the parson, who announced the fact from the pulpit, or reading-desk, whereupon ensued a rapid clearance of the church. The story is told of a parson at Poughill, near Morwenstow, who, on hearing the news, proceeded down the nave in his surplice as far as the font; and the people, supposing there was to be a christening, did not stir. But when he was near the door he shouted: “My Christian brethren, there’s a ship wrecked in the cove: let us all start fair!” and, flinging off his surplice, led the way to the scene of spoliation.
“I do not see why it is,” said a Cornish clerk one day, “why there be prayers in the Buke o’ Common Prayer for rain and for fine weather, and thanksgivings for them and for peace, and there’s no prayer for wrecks, nor thanksgiving for a really gude one when it is come.”
Mr. Hawker relates a good story in his Footprints, which was told him by an old man in his parish named Tony Cleverdon.
“There was once a noted old wrecker, named Kinsman: he lived in my father’s time; and when no wreck was onward he would get his wages by raising stone in a quarry by the seashore. Well, he was to work one day over yonder, half-way down the Tower-cliff, when all at once he saw two old ravens flying round and round very near his head. They dropped down into the quarry two pieces of wreck-candle just at the old man’s feet.” (Very often wreckers pick up Neapolitan wax candles from vessels in the Mediterranean trade that have been lost in the Channel.) “So when Kinsman saw the candles, he thought in his mind, ‘There is surely wreck coming in upon the beach’; so he packed his tools together, and left them just where he stood, and went his way wrecking. He could find no jetsam, however, though he searched far and wide. Next day he went back to quarry to his work. And he used to say it was as true as a proverb—there the tools were all buried deep out of sight, for the crag had given way; and if he had tarried an hour longer he must have been crushed to death. So you see, sir, what knowledge those ravens must have had; how well they knew the old man, and how dearly fond he was of wreck; how crafty they were to hit upon the only plan that would ever have slocked him away.”
Wrecks are terribly frequent on this coast. Not a winter passes without several. There are men living who can remember eighty.