After life’s fitful fever she sleeps well
Between the Heather and the Northern Sea.”
If Caedmon was Whitby’s first literary idol, Mary Linskill is the last and best loved, for hundreds of Whitby people living to-day knew the gentle authoress personally. She was a native of the town and being early dependent on her own resources, she served an apprenticeship in a milliner’s shop and later acted as an amanuensis to a literary gentleman. It was in this position, probably, that she discovered her own capacity for writing and her ability to tell a homely story in a simple, pleasing way. Her first efforts in the way of short stories appeared in “Good Words.” Her first novel, “Cleveden,” was published in 1876 and many others followed at various intervals. Perhaps the best known are distinctly Whitby stories—“The Haven Under the Hill,” and “Between the Heather and the Northern Sea.” Her novels in simplicity of plot and quiet sentiment may be compared with those of Jane Austen, though her rank as a writer is far below that of the Hampshire authoress. Her stories show a wealth of imagination and a true artistic temperament, but they are often too greatly dominated by melancholy to be widely popular. Most of them dwell on the infinite capacity of women for self-sacrifice and sometimes the pathetic scenes may be rather overdrawn. There are many beautiful descriptive passages and I quote one from “The Haven Under the Hill,” because it sets forth in such a delightful manner the charm of Old Whitby itself:
“Everywhere there was the presence of the sea. On the calmest day you heard the low, ceaseless roll of its music as it plashed and swept about the foot of the stern, darkly towering cliffs on either side of the harbour-bar. Everywhere the place was blown through and through with the salt breeze that was ‘half an air and half a water,’ scented with sea-wrack and laden not rarely with drifting flakes of heavy yeastlike foam.
“The rapid growth of the town had been owing entirely to its nearness to the sea. When the making of alum was begun at various points and bays along the coast, vessels were needed for carrying it to London, ‘whither,’ as an old chronicler tells us, ‘nobody belonging to Hild’s Haven had ever gone without making their wills.’ This was the beginning of the shipbuilding trade, which grew and flourished so vigorously, lending such an interest to the sights and sounds of the place, and finally becoming its very life. What would the old haven have been without the clatter of its carpenters’ hammers, the whir of its ropery wheels, the smell of its boiling tar-kettles, the busy stir and hum of its docks and wharves and mast-yards? And where, in the midst of so much labour, could there have been found any time to laugh or to dance, but for the frequent day of pride and rejoicing when the finished ship with her flying flags came slipping slowly from the stocks to the waiting waters, bending and gliding with a grace that gave you as much emotion as if you had watched some conscious thing?... It is a little sad to know that one has watched the launching of the last wooden ship that shall go out with stately masts and rounding sails from the Haven Under the Hill.
“Those of the men of the place who were not actually sailors were yet, for the most part, in some way dependent upon the great, changeful, bounteous sea.
“It was a beautiful place to have been born in, beautiful with history and poetry and legend—with all manner of memorable and soul-stirring things.”
The house where Mary Linskill was born, a plain stone structure in the old town, still stands and is the goal of occasional pilgrims who delight in the humbler shrines of letters.
It seems indeed appropriate that the old sea town, famous two centuries ago for its shipbuilding trade and hardy mariners, should have given to the world one of its great sea-captains and explorers. A mere lad, James Cook came to Whitby as the apprentice of a shipbuilder. His master’s house, where he lived during his apprenticeship, still stands in Grape Lane and bears an antique tablet with the date 1688. Cook’s career as an explorer began when he entered the Royal Navy in 1768. He was then forty years of age and had already established a reputation as a daring and efficient captain in the merchant service. He made three famous voyages to the south seas, and as a result of these, Australia and New Zealand are now a part of the British Empire, an achievement which will forever keep his name foremost among the world’s great explorers. He lost his life in a fight with the natives of the Sandwich Islands in 1777, a year after the American Declaration of Independence. His mangled remains were buried in the sea whose mysteries he had done so much to subdue.
I am sensible that in these random notes I have signally failed to set forth the varied charms of the ancient fisher-town on the Northern Sea, but I have the consolation that all the descriptions and encomiums I have read have the same failing to a greater or less degree. I know that we feel, as we speed across the moorland on the wild windy morning of our departure, that two sojourns in Whitby are not enough; and are already solacing ourselves with the hope that we shall some time make a third visit to the “Haven Under the Hill.”