e had been mastered and fairly taken in tow, and was
within two miles of the pier, and all hearts were merry with the
hopes of a prize which would make them rich, perhaps, for years to
come--one-third, I suppose, of the whole value of her cargo--how she
broke loose from them at the last moment, and rushed frantically in upon
those huge rocks below us, leaping great banks of slate at the blow of
each breaker, tearing off masses of ironstone which lie there to this
day to tell the tale, till she drove up high and dry against the cliff,
and lay, like an enormous stranded whale, grinding and crashing herself
to pieces against the walls of her adamantine cage. And well I recollect
the sad records of the log-book which was left on board the deserted
ship; how she had been waterlogged for weeks and weeks, buoyed up by her
timber cargo, the crew clinging in the tops, and crawling down, when
they dared, for putrid biscuit-dust and drops of water, till the water
was washed overboard and gone; and then notice after notice, "On this
day such an one died," "On this day such an one was washed away"--the
log kept up to the last, even when there was only that to tell, by the
stern business-like merchant skipper, whoever he was; and how at last,
when there was neither food nor water, the strong man's heart seemed
to have quailed, or perhaps risen, into a prayer, jotted down in the
log--"The Lord have mercy on us!"--and then a blank of several pages,
and, scribbled with a famine-shaken hand, "Remember thy Creator in the
days of thy youth;"--and so the log and the ship were left to the rats,
which covered the deck when our men boarded her. And well I remember
the last act of that tragedy; for a ship has really, as sailors feel,
a personality, almost a life and soul of her own; and as long as her
timbers hold together, all is not over. You can hardly call her a
corpse, though the human beings who inhabited her, and were her soul,
may have fled into the far eternities; and so we felt that night, as we
came down along the woodland road, with the north-west wind hurling dead
branches and showers of crisp oak-leaves about our heads; till suddenly,
as we staggered out of the wood, we came upon such a picture as it would
have baffled Correggio, or Rembrandt himself, to imitate. Under a
wall was a long tent of sails and spars, filled with Preventive men,
fishermen, Lloyd's underwriters, lying about in every variety of strange
attitude and costume;