The Vicar of Morwenstow: Being a Life of Robert Stephen Hawker, M.A.Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
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The Vicar of Morwenstow: Being a Life of Robert Stephen Hawker, M.A.
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Hawker, Robert Stephen, 1803?-1875
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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