Strange to say, Le Daine has been twice shipwrecked since his first peril, with similar loss of property, but escape of life; and he is now the master of a vessel in the trade of the Levant. In the following year a new and another wreck was announced in the gloom of night. A schooner under bare poles had been watched for many hours from the cliffs, with the steersman fastened at the wheel. All at once she tacked, and made for the shore, and just as she had reached a creek between two reefs of rock, she foundered and went down. At break of day only her vane was visible to mark her billowy grave. Not a vestige could be seen of her crew. But in the course of the day her boat was drifted ashore, and we found from the name on the stern that the vessel was the Phœnix of St. Ives. A letter from myself by immediate post brought up next day from that place a sailor who introduced himself as the brother of the young man who had sailed as mate in the wrecked ship. He was a rough, plain-spoken man, of simple religious cast, without guile or pretence; one of the good old seafaring sort; the men who “go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters”; these, as the Psalmist chants, “see the wonders of the Lord, and His glories in the deep.” At my side he paced the shore day after day, in weary quest of the dead. “If I could but get my poor brother’s bones,” he cried out yearningly, again and again, “if I could but lay him in the earth, how it would comfort dear mother at home!” We searched every cranny in the rocks, and we watched every surging wave, until hope was exchanged for despair. A reward, of meagre import, it is true, offered by the Seaman’s Burial Act, to which I have referred, and within my own domain doubled always by myself, brought us many a comrade in this sickening scrutiny; but for long it was in vain. At last, one day while we were scattered over a broken stretch of jumbled rocks that lay in huddled masses along the base of the cliffs, a loud and sudden shout called me where the seaman of St. Ives stood. He was gazing down into the broken sea—it was on a spot near low-water mark—and there, just visible from underneath a mighty fragment of rock, was seen the ankle of a man, and a foot still wearing a shoe! “It is my brother!” wailed the sailor bitterly; “it is our dear Jim; I can swear to that shoe!” We gathered around: the tide ebbed a very little after this discovery, and only just enough to leave dry the surface of the rock under which the body lay. Soon the sea began again to flow, and very quickly we were driven by the rising surges from the spot. The anguish of the mourner for his dead was thrilling to behold and terrible to hear. “Oh my brother! my brother!” was his sob again and again, “what a burial-place for our own dear boy!” I tried to soothe him, but in vain: the only theme to which he could be brought to listen was the chance—and I confess it seemed to my own secret mind a hopeless thought—that it might be possible at the next ebb tide, by skill and strength combined, to move, if ever so little, the monstrous rock, and so recover the corpse. It was low water at evening tide, and there was a bright November moon. We gathered in numbers; for among my parishioners there were kind and gentle-hearted men, such as had “pity, tenderness and tears”; and all were moved by the tale of the sailor hurled and buried beneath a rock by the strong and cruel sea. The scene of our first nightly assemblage was a weird and striking sight. Far, far above, loomed the tall and gloomy headlands of the coast; around us foamed and raged the boiling waves; the moon cast her massive lowering shadows on rock and sea;
And the long moonbeam on the cold, wet sand
Lay, like a jasper column, half-upreared.
Stout and stalwart forms surrounded me, wielding their iron bars, pickaxes and ropes. Their efforts were strenuous but unavailing. The tide soon returned in its strength, and drove us, baffled from the spot, before we had been able to grasp or shake the ponderous mass. It was calculated by competent judges that its weight was full fifteen tons: neither could there be a more graphic image of the resistless strength of the wrathful sea, than the aspect of this and similar blocks of rifted stone, that were raised and rolled perpetually by the power of the billows, and hurled, as in some pastime of the giants, along the shuddering shore! Deep and bitter was the grief of the sailor at our failure and retreat. His piteous wail over the dead recalled the agony of those who are recorded in Holy Writ—they who grieved for their lost ones, and would not be comforted, because they were not! That night an inspiration visited me in my wakeful bed. At a neighbouring harbour dwelt a relative of mine, who was an engineer, in charge of the machinery on a breakwater and canal. To him, at morning light, I sent an appeal for succour; and he immediately responded with aid and advice. Two strong windlasses, worked by iron chains, and three or four skilful men, were sent up by him next day with instructions for their work. Again at evening ebb we were all on the spot. One of our new assistants, a very Tubal Cain in aspect and stature, and of the same craft with that smith before the flood, plunged upon the rock as the water reluctantly revealed its upper side, and drilled a couple of holes in the surface with rapid energy, to receive, each of them, that which he called a Lewis-wedge and a ring. To these the chains of the windlasses were fastened on. They then looped a rope around the ankle of the corpse, and gave it, as the post of honour, to me to hold. It was on the evening of Sunday[[28]] that all this was done; and I have deemed it a venial breach of discipline to omit the nightly service of the church, in order to suit the tide. Forty strong parishioners, all absentees from evening prayer, manned the double windlass power; I intoned the pull; and by a strong and blended effort, the rocky mass was slowly, silently and gently upheaved; a slight haul at the rope, and up to our startled view and to the sudden lights, came forth the altered, ghastly, flattened semblance of a man! “My brother! my brother!” shrieked a well-known voice at my side, and tears of gratitude and suffering gushed in mingled torrent over his rugged cheek. A coffin had been made ready, under the hope of final success; and therein we reverently laid the disfigured carcass of one who, a little while before, had been the young and joyous inmate of a fond and happy home. We had to clamber up a steep and difficult pathway along the cliff with the body, which was carried by the bearers in a kind of funeral train. The vicar of course led the way.[[29]] When we were about half-way up, a singular and striking event occurred, which moved us all exceedingly. Unobserved, for all were intent in their solemn task, a vessel had neared the shore: she lay to, and, as it seemed, had watched us with night-glasses from the deck, or had discerned us from the torches and lanterns in our hands. For all at once there sounded along the air three deep and thrilling cheers! And we could see that the crew on board had manned their yards. It was manifest that their loyal and hearty voices and gestures were intended to greet our fulfilment of duty to a brother mariner’s remains. The burial-place of the dead sailors in this churchyard is a fair and fitting scene for their quiet rest. Full in view, and audible in sound, for ever rolls the sea. Is it not to them a soothing requiem that
Old Ocean, with its everlasting voice,
As in perpetual jubilee, proclaims
The praises of the Almighty?
Trees stand, like warders, beside their graves; and the Norman shingled church, “the mother of us all,” dwells in silence by, to watch over her safe and slumbering dead. And it recalls the imagery of the Holy Book wherein we read of the gathered reliques of the ancient slain: “And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night”.
A year had passed away when the return of the equinox admonished us again to listen for storms and wrecks. There are men in this district whose usage it is at every outbreak of a gale of wind to watch the cliffs from rise to set of sun. Of these my quaint old parishioner, Peter Barrow, was one. On a wild winter day I found myself seated on a rock with Peter standing by, at a point that overhung the sea. We were both gazing with anxious dismay at a ship which was beating to and fro in the Channel, and had now drifted much too near to the shore: she had come into sight some hours before, struggling with Harty Race, the local name of a narrow boisterous run of sea between Lundy and the land; and she was now within three or four miles of our rocks. “Ah, sir!” said Peter, “the coastmen say—
From Padstowe Point to Lundy Light,