Yet, I had never seen
it in my life, a minute before, and had traversed two hundred miles
to get at it. That very morning I had come bowling down, and
struggling up, hill-country roads; looking back at snowy summits;
meeting courteous peasants well to do, driving fat pigs and cattle
to market: noting the neat and thrifty dwellings, with their
unusual quantity of clean white linen, drying on the bushes; having
windy weather suggested by every cotter's little rick, with its
thatch straw-ridged and extra straw-ridged into overlapping
compartments like the back of a rhinoceros. Had I not given a lift
of fourteen miles to the Coast-guardsman (kit and all), who was
coming to his spell of duty there, and had we not just now parted
company? So it was; but the journey seemed to glide down into the
placid sea, with other chafe and trouble, and for the moment
nothing was so calmly and monotonously real under the sunlight as
the gentle rising and falling of the water with its freight, the
regular turning of the windlass aboard the Lighter, and the slight
obstruction so very near my feet.
O reader, haply turning this page by the fireside at Home, and
hearing the night wind rumble in the chimney, that slight
obstruction was the uppermost fragment of the Wreck of the Royal
Charter, Australian trader and passenger ship, Homeward bound, that
struck here on the terrible morning of the twenty-sixth of this
October, broke into three parts, went down with her treasure of at
least five hundred human lives, and has never stirred since!
From which point, or from which, she drove ashore, stern foremost;
on which side, or on which, she passed the little Island in the
bay, for ages henceforth to be aground certain yards outside her;
these are rendered bootless questions by the darkness of that night
and the darkness of death. Here she went down.
Even as I stood on the beach with the words 'Here she went down!'
in my ears, a diver in his grotesque dress, dipped heavily over the
side of the boat alongside the Lighter, and dropped to the bottom.
On the shore by the water's edge, was a rough tent, made of
fragments of wreck, where other divers and workmen sheltered
themselves, and where they had kept Christmas-day with rum and
roast beef, to the destruction of their frail chimney. Cast up
among the stones and boulders of the beach, were great spars of the
lost vessel, and masses of iron twisted by the fury of the sea into
the strangest forms. The timber was already bleached and iron
rusted, and even these objects did no violence to the prevailing
air the whole scene wore, of having been exactly the same for years
and years.
Yet, only two short months had gone, since a man, living on the
nearest hill-top overlooking the sea, being blown out of bed at
about daybreak by the wind that had begun to strip his roof off,
and getting upon a ladder with his nearest neighbour to construct
some temporary device for keeping his house over his head, saw from
the ladder's elevation as he looked down by chance towards the
shore, some dark troubled object close in with the land. And he
and the other, descending to the beach, and finding the sea
mercilessly beating over a great broken ship, had clambered up the
stony ways, like staircases without stairs, on which the wild
village hangs in little clusters, as fruit hangs on boughs, and had
given the alarm.
