They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters; these men see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep. For at His word the stormy wind ariseth, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep; their soul melteth away because of the trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end. So when they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, He delivereth them out of their distress. For He maketh the storm to cease, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad, because they are at rest; and so He bringeth them unto the haven where they would be.
This psalm coming in its proper order seemed strangely appropriate, read with those dead mariners for a congregation.
The narrative of the wreck of the Caledonia in 1843 must not be told by any other than Mr. Hawker himself. The following is extracted from his “Remembrances of a Cornish Vicar,”[[26]] slightly shortened.
At daybreak of an autumn day I was aroused by a knock at my bedroom door: it was followed by the agitated voice of a boy, a member of my household: “Oh, sir, there are dead men on Vicarage Rocks!”
In a moment I was up, and in my cassock and slippers rushed out. There stood my lad, weeping bitterly, and holding out to me in his trembling hands a tortoise alive. I found afterwards that he had grasped it on the beach, and brought it in his hand as a strange and marvellous arrival from the waves, but in utter ignorance of what it might be. I ran across my glebe, a quarter of a mile, to the cliffs, and down a frightful descent of three hundred feet to the beach. It was indeed a scene to be looked on only once in a human life. On a ridge of rock, just left bare by the falling tide, stood a man, my own servant: he had come out to see my flock of ewes, and had found the awful wreck. There he stood, with two dead sailors at his feet, whom he had just drawn out of the water, stiff and stark. The bay was tossing and seething with a tangled mass of rigging and broken fragments of a ship; the billows rolled up yellow with corn, for the cargo of the vessel had been foreign wheat; and ever and anon there came up out of the water, as though stretched out with life, a human hand and arm. It was the corpse of another sailor drifting out to sea. “Is there no one alive?” was my first question to my man. “I think there is, sir,” he said, “for just now I thought I heard a cry.” I made haste in the direction he pointed out; and on turning a rock, just where a brook of fresh water fell to the sea, there lay the body of a man in a seaman’s garb. He had reached the water faint with thirst, but was too much exhausted to swallow or drink. He opened his eyes at our voices; and, as he saw me leaning over him in my cassock, he sobbed with a piteous cry: “Oh, mon père, mon père!” Gradually he revived; and when he had fully come to himself with the help of cordials and food, we gathered from him the mournful tale of his vessel and her wreck. He was a Jersey man by birth, and had been shipped at Malta, on the homeward voyage of the vessel from the port of Odessa with corn.
Mr. Hawker wrote this account for a periodical, without giving the name of the place, or signing the article. This explains a few trifling deviations from fact. He goes on to relate how he took Le Daine into his house. This was not strictly true. Le Daine was found by another gentleman, and taken by him into his father’s house in Morwenstow parish, where he was carefully and kindly nursed till his recovery. Mr. Hawker continues his narrative thus:—
I returned to the scene of death and danger, where my man awaited me. He had found, in addition to the two corpses, another dead body, jammed under a rock. By this time a crowd of people had arrived from the land, and at my request they began to search anxiously for the dead. It was indeed a terrible scene. The vessel, a brig of five hundred tons, had struck, as we afterwards found, at three o’clock that morning; and, by the time the wreck was discovered, she had been shattered into broken pieces by the fury of the sea. The rocks and water bristled with fragments of mast and spar and rent timbers; the cordage lay about in tangled masses. The rollers tumbled in volumes of corn, the wheaten cargo; and amidst it all the bodies of the helpless dead—that a few brief hours before had walked the deck, the stalwart masters of their ship—turned their disfigured faces towards the sky, pleading for sepulture. We made a temporary bier of the broken planks, and laid thereon the corpses, decently arranged. As the vicar, I led the way, and my people followed with ready zeal as bearers; and in sad procession we carried our dead up the steep cliff, by a difficult path, to await, in a room at my vicarage which I allotted them, the inquest. The ship and her cargo were, as to any tangible value, utterly lost.
The people of the shore, after having done their best to search for survivors and to discover the lost bodies, gathered up fragments of the wreck for fuel and shouldered them away; not perhaps a lawful spoil, but a venal transgression when compared with the remembered cruelties of Cornish wreckers. Then ensued my interview with the rescued man. His name was Le Daine. I found him refreshed, collected and grateful. He told me his tale of the sea. The captain and all the crew but himself were from Arbroath in Scotland. To that harbour also the vessel belonged. She had been away on a two-years’ voyage, employed in the Mediterranean trade. She had loaded last at Odessa. She touched at Malta; and there Le Daine, who had been sick in the hospital, but recovered, had joined her. There also the captain had engaged a Portuguese cook; and to this man, as one link in a chain of causes, the loss of the vessel might be ascribed. He had been wounded in a street quarrel the night before the vessel sailed from Malta and lay disabled and useless in his cabin throughout the homeward voyage. At Falmouth, whither they were bound for orders, the cook died. The captain and all the crew, except the cabin-boy, went ashore to attend the funeral. During their absence the boy, handling in his curiosity the barometer, had broken the tube and the whole of the quicksilver had run out. Had this instrument, the pulse of the storm, been preserved, the crew would have received warning of the sudden and unexpected hurricane and might have stood out to sea; whereas they were caught in the chops of the Channel, and thus, by this small incident, the vessel and the mariners found their fate on the rocks of a remote headland in my lonely parish. I caused Le Daine to relate in detail the closing events.
“We received orders,” he said, “at Falmouth to make for Gloucester to discharge. The captain and mate and another of the crew were to be married on their return to their native town. They wrote, therefore, to Arbroath from Falmouth, to announce their safe arrival from their two-years’ voyage, and their hope in about a week to arrive at Arbroath for welcome there.”
But in a day or two after this joyful letter there arrived in Arbroath a leaf torn out of my pocket-book and addressed “To the Owners of the Vessel the Caledonia of Arbroath,” with the brief and thrilling tidings, written by myself in pencil, among the fragments of their wrecked vessel, that the whole crew, except one man, were lost “upon my rocks.” My note spread a general dismay in Arbroath, for the crew, from the clannish relationship among the Scotch, were connected with a large number of the inhabitants. But to return to the touching details of Le Daine.