“We rounded the Land’s End,” he said, “that night all well, and came up Channel with a fair wind. The captain turned in. It was my watch. All at once, about nine at night, it began to blow in one moment as if the storm burst out by signal; the wind went mad; our canvas burst in bits. We reeved fresh sails: they went also. At last we were under bare poles. The captain had turned out when the storm began. He sent me forward to look out for Lundy Light. I saw your cliff.” [This was a bluff and broken headland just by the southern boundary of my own glebe.] “I sang out, ‘Land!’ I had hardly done so when she struck with a blow and stuck fast. Then the captain sang out, ‘All hands to the maintop!’ and we all went up. The captain folded his arms and stood by silent.”
Here I asked him, anxious to know how they expressed themselves at such a time, “But what was said afterwards, Le Daine?”
“Not one word, sir; only once, when the long boat went over, I said to the skipper: ’sir, the boat is gone.’ But he made no answer.”
How accurate was Byron’s painting!—
“Then shrieked the timid, and stood still the brave.”
“At last there came on a dreadful wave, mast-top high, and away went the mast by the board, and we with it, into the sea. I gave myself up. I was the only man on the ship that could not swim; so, where I fell into the water, there I lay. I felt the waves beat me and send me on. At last there was a rock under my hand. I clung on. Just then I saw Alick Kant, one of our crew, swimming past. I saw him lay his hand on a rock, and I sang out, ‘Hold on, Alick!’ But a wave rolled and swept him away, and I never saw his face more. I was beaten onward and onward among the rocks and the tide, and at last I felt the ground with my feet. I scrambled on. I saw the cliff, steep and dark, above my head. I climbed up until I reached a kind of platform with grass; and there I fell down flat upon my face, and either I fainted away, or I fell asleep. There I lay a long time, and when I awoke it was just the break of day. There was a little yellow flower under my head; and, when I saw that, I knew I was on dry land.” This was a plant of the bird’s-foot clover, called in old times, Our Lady’s Finger. He went on: “I could see no house or sign of people, and the country looked to me like some wild and desert island. At last I felt very thirsty, and I tried to get down towards a valley where I thought I should find water. But before I could reach it I fell and grew faint again; and there, thank God, sir, you found me.”
Such was Le Daine’s sad and simple story; and no one could listen unmoved to the poor solitary survivor of his shipmates and crew. The coroner arrived, held his ’quest, and the usual verdict of “Wrecked and cast ashore” empowered me to inter the dead sailors, found and future, from the same vessel, with the service in the Prayer-Book for the Burial of the Dead. This decency of sepulture is the result of a somewhat recent statute, passed in the reign of George III. Before that time it was the common usage of the coast to dig, just above high-water mark, a pit on the shore, and therein to cast, without inquest or religious rite, the carcasses of shipwrecked men. My first funeral of those lost mariners was a touching and striking scene. The three bodies first found were buried at the same time. Behind the coffins, as they were solemnly borne along the aisle, walked the solitary mourner, Le Daine, weeping bitterly and aloud. Other eyes were moist; for who could hear unsoftened the greeting of the Church to these strangers from the sea, and the “touch that makes the whole earth kin,” in the hope we breathed, that we too might one day “rest as these our brethren did”? It was well-nigh too much for those who served that day. Nor was the interest subdued when, on the Sunday after the wreck, at the appointed place in the service, just before the General Thanksgiving, Le Daine rose up from his place, approached the altar, and uttered in an audible but broken voice, his thanksgiving for his singular and safe deliverance from the perils of the sea.
The text of the sermon that day demands its history. Some time before, a vessel, The Hero, of Liverpool, was seen in distress, in the offing of a neighbouring harbour, during a storm. The crew, mistaking a signal from the beach, betook themselves to their boat. It foundered; and the whole ship’s company, twelve in number, were drowned in sight of the shore. But the stout ship held together, and drifted on to the land, so unshattered by the sea, that the coast-guard, who went immediately on board, found the fire burning in the cabin. When the vessel came to be examined, they found in one of the berths a Bible, and between its leaves a sheet of paper, whereon some recent hand had transcribed verses, the twenty-first, twenty-second and twenty-third of the thirty-third chapter of Isaiah. The same hand had also marked the passage with a line of ink along the margin. The name of the owner of the book was also found inscribed on the fly-leaf. He was a youth of eighteen years of age, the son of a widow; and a statement under his name recorded that the Bible was “a reward for his good conduct in a Sunday school.” This text, so identified and enforced by a hand that soon after grew cold, appeared strangely and strikingly adapted to the funeral of shipwrecked men; and it was therefore chosen as the theme for our solemn day. The very hearts of the people seemed hushed to hear it; and every eye was turned towards Le Daine, who bowed his head upon his hands and wept. These are the words: “But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ships pass thereby. For the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us. Thy tacklings are loosed; they could not well strengthen their mast, they could not spread the sail: then is the prey of a great spoil divided; the lame take the prey.” Shall I be forgiven for the vaunt, if I declare that there was not literally a single face that day unmoistened and unmoved? Few, indeed, could have borne without deep emotion to see and hear Le Daine. He remained at Morwenstow six weeks; and during the whole of this time we sought diligently, and at last we found the whole crew, nine in number. They were discovered, some under rocks, jammed in by the force of the water, so that it took sometimes several ebb-tides, and the strength of many hands to extricate the corpses. The captain I came upon myself, lying placidly upon his back, with his arms folded in the very gesture which Le Daine had described as he stood amid the crew on the main-top. The hand of the spoiler was about to assail him, when I suddenly appeared, so that I rescued him untouched. Each hand grasped a small pouch or bag. One contained his pistols, the other held two little log-reckoners of brass; so that his last thoughts were full of duty to his owners and his ship, and his last efforts for rescue and defence. He had been manifestly lifted by a billow, and hurled against a rock, and so slain; for the victims of our cruel sea are seldom drowned, but beaten to death by violence and the wrath of the billows. We gathered together one poor fellow in five parts: his limbs had been wrenched off and his body rent. During our search for his remains, a man came up to me with something in his hand, inquiring: “Can you tell me, sir, what is this? Is it a part of a man?” It was the mangled seaman’s heart; and we restored it reverently to its place, where it had once beat high with life and courage, with thrilling hope and sickening fear. Two or three of the dead were not discovered for four or five weeks after the wreck; and these had become so loathsome from decay, that it was at peril of health and life to perform the last duties we owe to our brother-men. But hearts and hands were found for the work; and at last, the good ship’s company, captain, mate and crew, were laid at rest, side by side, beneath our churchyard trees. Groups of grateful letters from Arbroath are to this day among the most cherished memorials of my escritoire. Some, written by the friends of the dead, are marvellous proofs of the good feeling and educated ability of the Scotch people. One from a father breaks off in irrepressible pathos, with a burst of “Oh my son, my son!” We placed at the foot of the captain’s grave the figure-head of his vessel. It is a carved image, life-size of his native Caledonia, in the garb of her country, with sword and shield.[[27]]
At the end of about six weeks Le Daine left my house on his homeward way, a sadder and a richer man. Gifts had been proffered from many a hand, so that he was able to return to Jersey with happy and joyful mien, well clothed and with thirty pounds in his purse. His recollections of our scenery were not such as were in former times associated with the Cornish shore: for three years afterward he returned to the place of his disaster accompanied by his uncle, sister and affianced wife, and he had brought them, that, in his own joyous words, “they might see the spot of his great deliverance”; and there, one summer day, they stood, a group of happy faces, gazing with wonder and gratitude on our rugged cliffs, that were then clad in that gorgeous vesture of purple and gold which the heather and gorse wind and weave along the heights; and the soft blue wave lapping the sand in gentle cadence, as though the sea had never wreaked an impulse of ferocity, or rent a helpless prey. Nor was the thankfulness of the sailor a barren feeling. Whensoever afterward the vicar sought to purchase for his dairy a Jersey cow, the family and friends of Le Daine rejoiced to ransack the island until they had found the sleekest, loveliest, best, of that beautiful breed; and it is to the gratitude of that poor seaman and stranger from a distant abode, that the herd of the glebe has long been famous in the land; and hence, as Homer would have sung, hence came
Bleehtah, and Lilith, Neelah, Evan, Neelah, and Katy.