Is a watery grave by day or night.
And I think the poor fellows off there will find it so.” All at once, as we still watched the vessel labouring in the sea, a boat was launched over her side, and several men plunged into it one by one. With strained and anxious eyes we searched the billows for the course of the boat. Sometimes we caught a glimpse as it rode upon some surging wave; then it disappeared a while. At last we could see it no more. Meanwhile the vessel had held down Channel, tacked and steered as if still beneath the guidance of some of her crew, although it must have been in sheer desperation that they still hugged the shore. What was to be done? If she struck, the men still on board must perish without help, for nightfall drew on. If the boat reappeared, Peter could make a signal where to land. In hot haste then I made for the vicarage, ordered my horse, and returned towards the cliffs. The ship rode on, and I accompanied her way along the shore. She reached the offing of Bude Haven, and there grounded on the sand. No boatman could be induced to put off, and thick darkness soon after fell. I returned worn, heartsick, and weary on my homeward way; there strange tidings greeted me: the boat which we had watched so long had been rolled ashore by the billows, empty. Peter Barrow had hauled her above high-water mark, and had found a name, the Alonzo of Stockton-on-Tees, on her stern. That night I wrote as usual to the owner, with news of the wreck, and the next day we were able to guess at the misfortunes of the stranded ship: a boat had visited the vessel, and found her freighted with iron from Gloucester for a Queen’s yard round the Land’s End. Her papers in the cabin showed that her crew of nine men had been reported all sound and well three days before. The owners’ agent arrived; and he stated that her captain was a brave and trusty officer, and that he must have been compelled by his men to join them when they deserted the ship. They must all have been swamped and lost not long after the launch of the boat, and while we watched for them in vain amid the waves. Then ensued what has long been with me the saddest and most painful duty of the shore: we sought and waited for the dead. Now, there is a folk-lore of the beach, that no corpse will float or be found until the ninth day after death. The truth is, that about that time the body proceeds to decompose; and as a natural result it ascends to the surface of the current, is brought into the shallows of the tide, and is there found. The owners’ representative was my guest for ten days; and with the help of the ship’s papers and his own personal knowledge we were able to identify the dead. First of all, the body of the captain came in: he was a fine, stalwart, and resolute-looking man. His countenance, however, had a grim and angry aspect, just such an expression as would verify the truth of our suspicion that he had been driven by others to forsake his deck. Then arrived the mate and three other men of the crew. None were placid of feature or calm and pleasant in look, as those usually are who are accidentally drowned, or who die in their beds.
But one day my strange old man, Peter Barrow, came to me in triumphant haste with the loud greeting, “Sir! we have got a noble corpse down on your beach. We have just laid him down above high-water mark, and he is as comely a body as a man shall see!” I made haste to the spot; and there lay, with the light of a calm and wintry day falling on his manly form, a fine and stately example of a man: he was six feet two inches in height, of firm and accurate proportion throughout; and he must have been, indeed, in life a shape of noble symmetry and grace. On his broad smooth chest was tattooed a rood, that is to say, our blessed Saviour on His cross, with on the one hand His mother, and on the other St. John the Evangelist: underneath were the initial letters of a name, P. B. His arms also were marked with tracery in the same blue lines. On his right arm was engraved P. B. again, and E. M., the letters linked with a wreath; and on his left arm was an anchor, as I imagined the symbol of hope, and the small blue forget-me-not flower. The greater number of my dead sailors—and I have myself said the burial-service over forty-two such men rescued from the sea—were so decorated with some distinctive emblem and name; and it is their object and intent, when they assume these signs, to secure identity for their bodies if their lives are lost at sea. We carried the strangely decorated man to his comrades of the deck; and gradually in the course of one month we discovered and carefully buried the total crew of nine strong men. These gathered strangers, the united assemblage from many a distant and diverse abode, now calmly slept among our rural and homely graves, the stout seamen of the ship Alonzo of Stockton-on-Tees. The boat which had foundered with them we brought also to the churchyard; and there, just by their place of rest, we placed her beside them, keel upward to the sky, in token that her work, too, was over, and her voyage done. There her timbers slowly moulder still; and by-and-by her dust will mingle in the scenery of death with the ashes of those living hearts and hands that manned her, in their last unavailing launch, and fruitless struggle for the mastery of life.[[30]] But the history of the Alonzo is not yet closed. Three years afterwards a letter arrived from the Danish consul at a neighbouring seaport town, addressed to myself as the vicar of the parish; and the hope of the writer was that he might be able to ascertain through myself, for two anxious and grieving parents in Denmark, tidings of their lost son. His name, he said, was Philip Bengstein; and it was in the correspondence that this strange and touching history transpired. The father, who immediately afterward wrote to my address, told me in tearful words that his son, bearing that name, had gone away from his native home because his parents had resisted a marriage which he was desirous to contract. They found that he had gone to sea before the mast, a position much below his station in life; and they had traced him from ship to ship, until at last they found him on the papers of the Alonzo of Stockton-on-Tees. Then their inquiry as to the fate of that vessel had led them to the knowledge, through the owners, that the vicar of a parish on the seaboard of North Cornwall could in all likelihood convey to them some tidings of their long lost son. I related in reply the history of the death, discovery and burial of the unfortunate young man. I was enabled to verify and to understand the initial letters of his own name, and of her who was not to become his bride, although she still clung to his memory in loving loneliness in that foreign land. Ample evidence, therefore, verified his corpse; and I was proudly enabled to certify to his parents the reverent burial of their child. A letter is treasured among my papers filled to overflowing with the strong and earnest gratitude of a stranger and a Dane for the kindness we had rendered to one who loved “not wisely” perchance, “but too well,” to that son who had been lost, and was found too late; one, too, whose “course of true love” had brought him from distant Denmark to a green hillock among the dead, beneath a lonely tower among the trees, by the Cornish sea. What a picture was that which we saw painted upon the bosom and limbs of a dead man, of fond and faithful love, of severed and broken hearts, of disappointed hope, of a vacant chair and a hushed voice in a far-away Danish home!
CHAPTER VI
Wellcombe—Mr. Hawker Postman to Wellcombe—The Miss Kitties—Advertisement of Roger Giles—Superstitions—The Evil Eye—The Spiritual Ether—The Vicar’s Pigs Bewitched—Horse killed by a Witch—He finds a lost Hen—A Lecture against Witchcraft—Its Failure—An Encounter with the Pixies—Curious Picture of a Pixie Revel—The Fairy-Ring—Antony Cleverdon and the Mermaids.
About three miles from Morwenstow as the crow flies, and five or six by road, on the coast, is a little church and hamlet called Wellcombe. The church probably occupies the site of a cell of St. Nectan, and is dedicated to him. It is old and was interesting.[[31]] The parish forms a horseshoe with the heels toward the sea, which is here reached by a rapidly descending glen ending in a cove. It is a small parish, with some 230 inhabitants, people of a race different from those in the adjoining parishes, with black eyes and hair, and dark-skinned. “Dark-grained as a Wellcombe woman,” is a saying in the neighbourhood when a brunette is being described. The people are singularly ignorant and superstitious: they are a religious people, and attend church with great regularity and devotion.
The chief landowner and lord of the manor is Lord Clinton, and the vicarage is in his gift. It is worth only seventy pounds, and there is neither glebe nor parsonage house; consequently Wellcombe formerly went with Hartland or Morwenstow.
When Mr. Hawker became vicar of Morwenstow, Wellcombe was held by the vicar of Hartland; but on his death, in 1851, Lord Clinton gave it to Mr. Hawker.
Mr. Hawker accordingly took three services every Sunday. He had his morning prayer at Morwenstow, at eleven, and then drove over to Wellcombe, where he had afternoon service at two P.M., and then returned to Morwenstow for evening prayer at five P.M.