The beginning of The Wreck at Sharpnose Point
She stood in the graveyard and stared at the sea, as if to understand the hurt it had once done her.
The first I knew of her was when my dog began to bark. The din ejected the rooks from their roosts in the sycamores and drove a black cloud of them among the four tall chimneys of the vicarage. As the footpath emerged from that building's lee, scraps of sea spume streamed inland on the afternoon wind. They collided against old stone walls and slate headstones patterned with lichen, or planted salty drying kisses on my seaward ear.
She stood beneath oaks and sycamores on high ground, close to the lychgate and the stone outhouse that formed the graveyard's south-east corner. A train of celandines lay about her feet. She was dressed in a tam-o'-shanter and a sporran, and held a cutlass and a round shield on which a flowering thistle was carved. A sash hung from her left shoulder, and beneath it was a glimpse of chainmail like mermaid scales. Painted white, she was almost life-size.
At my approach, the incensed dog backed into a whimper. And as he slunk away to ponder that woman's mysterious motionless, I marvelled at her effect upon the sombre surroundings. She conjured a more beguiling atmosphere than that of the average graveyard, where the standard expressions of regret are whispered and mortality is conceded with a shrug. She defied the quiescent epitaphs on the headstones - Thy Will be Done; Rest in Peace; Watch for ye know not when your Lord doth come - striving for life in a place that would not have it. She brandished her cutlass undaunted and advanced, it seemed, with a goose step or the high kick of a reeler on the nearby church and the sea cliffs three fields to the west.
The figure, then, of a martial Scottish maid from another time had ended up in a remote Cornish graveyard. But that hardly explained her. I laid an exploratory hand upon her shoulder. I'd expected dense statue metal and was surprised by the wood grain there, a faint responsiveness pulsing beneath the paint under my fingers. Then, behind her, I noticed the stone Celtic cross that stood close to the lychgate. Beneath a peeling crust of lichen an inscription read: To the glory of God, and in memory of shipwrecked sailors buried in this graveyard unknown and yet well known. He sent from on high, He took me, He drew me out of great waters. All at once a crowd of images stumbled over each other in an eagerness to present themselves: the white maid high on a prow, steep seas breaking over her and flinging themselves among flailing shreds of canvas. She was a ship's figurehead.
By the nineteenth century, heyday of the figurehead tradition, ship decoration in general had long since retreated from the excesses of the Elizabethans. Like superstition, which had largely inspired it, the tradition fell back before the advance of the machine age. But while the elaborately carved, painted, and gilded sterns, cannon ports, rudder posts, and masts, galleries bearing coats of arms, and Gothic pillars had long since gone, the tenacious figurehead flourished, as if the old impulse of embellishment had not been abandoned but merely concentrated at the bows in a single adornment.
The figureheads of nineteenth-century merchant ships were by all accounts a colourful cast. Included among them were rajahs and American Indian chiefs, Arthurian knights, sprites and fairies, characters from Scott and Shakespeare, gypsy brides and sea creatures, revered admirals and statesmen, and even favourite daughters; they all spoke of their shipowners' origins and enthusiasms.
That it was a Scottish ship that had come to grief here went without saying. The figurehead was not less than Scotia, the spirited national embodiment of the eras of Burns and Scott. Though the Scots, currently reclaiming their sense of nationhood, had good reason to invoke her, their fiery lass had long since fallen out of use. What had endured, ironically enough, was her British rival (if only upon the change in my pocket where stately Britannia appeared seated upon the fifty-pence coin, with a compliant lion alongside her and an olive branch in her outstretched hand). It was easy to see why the two had not got on.
The figurehead tradition had graver origins, however, in ancient rites performed to placate the gods of the sea. Even in Victorian times, as mechanization loomed large, the figurehead served as a heartfelt appeal for divine protection, shielding sailors from the misfortunes of their hazardous lives. Dark irony, then, to find this white maid resurrected in the alien element of a graveyard's soil, for which one explanation alone could account. Ripped from her deck fixings in an unknown upheaval, she had failed her ship and the crew she now stood over, their talisman to fortune recast as a memorial to disaster.
Click here for Amazon's UK page for The Wreck at Sharpnose Point, or for Amazon's US page for Treachery at Sharpnose Point.
She stood in the graveyard and stared at the sea, as if to understand the hurt it had once done her.
The first I knew of her was when my dog began to bark. The din ejected the rooks from their roosts in the sycamores and drove a black cloud of them among the four tall chimneys of the vicarage. As the footpath emerged from that building's lee, scraps of sea spume streamed inland on the afternoon wind. They collided against old stone walls and slate headstones patterned with lichen, or planted salty drying kisses on my seaward ear.
She stood beneath oaks and sycamores on high ground, close to the lychgate and the stone outhouse that formed the graveyard's south-east corner. A train of celandines lay about her feet. She was dressed in a tam-o'-shanter and a sporran, and held a cutlass and a round shield on which a flowering thistle was carved. A sash hung from her left shoulder, and beneath it was a glimpse of chainmail like mermaid scales. Painted white, she was almost life-size.
At my approach, the incensed dog backed into a whimper. And as he slunk away to ponder that woman's mysterious motionless, I marvelled at her effect upon the sombre surroundings. She conjured a more beguiling atmosphere than that of the average graveyard, where the standard expressions of regret are whispered and mortality is conceded with a shrug. She defied the quiescent epitaphs on the headstones - Thy Will be Done; Rest in Peace; Watch for ye know not when your Lord doth come - striving for life in a place that would not have it. She brandished her cutlass undaunted and advanced, it seemed, with a goose step or the high kick of a reeler on the nearby church and the sea cliffs three fields to the west.
The figure, then, of a martial Scottish maid from another time had ended up in a remote Cornish graveyard. But that hardly explained her. I laid an exploratory hand upon her shoulder. I'd expected dense statue metal and was surprised by the wood grain there, a faint responsiveness pulsing beneath the paint under my fingers. Then, behind her, I noticed the stone Celtic cross that stood close to the lychgate. Beneath a peeling crust of lichen an inscription read: To the glory of God, and in memory of shipwrecked sailors buried in this graveyard unknown and yet well known. He sent from on high, He took me, He drew me out of great waters. All at once a crowd of images stumbled over each other in an eagerness to present themselves: the white maid high on a prow, steep seas breaking over her and flinging themselves among flailing shreds of canvas. She was a ship's figurehead.
By the nineteenth century, heyday of the figurehead tradition, ship decoration in general had long since retreated from the excesses of the Elizabethans. Like superstition, which had largely inspired it, the tradition fell back before the advance of the machine age. But while the elaborately carved, painted, and gilded sterns, cannon ports, rudder posts, and masts, galleries bearing coats of arms, and Gothic pillars had long since gone, the tenacious figurehead flourished, as if the old impulse of embellishment had not been abandoned but merely concentrated at the bows in a single adornment.
The figureheads of nineteenth-century merchant ships were by all accounts a colourful cast. Included among them were rajahs and American Indian chiefs, Arthurian knights, sprites and fairies, characters from Scott and Shakespeare, gypsy brides and sea creatures, revered admirals and statesmen, and even favourite daughters; they all spoke of their shipowners' origins and enthusiasms.
That it was a Scottish ship that had come to grief here went without saying. The figurehead was not less than Scotia, the spirited national embodiment of the eras of Burns and Scott. Though the Scots, currently reclaiming their sense of nationhood, had good reason to invoke her, their fiery lass had long since fallen out of use. What had endured, ironically enough, was her British rival (if only upon the change in my pocket where stately Britannia appeared seated upon the fifty-pence coin, with a compliant lion alongside her and an olive branch in her outstretched hand). It was easy to see why the two had not got on.
The figurehead tradition had graver origins, however, in ancient rites performed to placate the gods of the sea. Even in Victorian times, as mechanization loomed large, the figurehead served as a heartfelt appeal for divine protection, shielding sailors from the misfortunes of their hazardous lives. Dark irony, then, to find this white maid resurrected in the alien element of a graveyard's soil, for which one explanation alone could account. Ripped from her deck fixings in an unknown upheaval, she had failed her ship and the crew she now stood over, their talisman to fortune recast as a memorial to disaster.
Click here for Amazon's UK page for The Wreck at Sharpnose Point, or for Amazon's US page for Treachery at Sharpnose Point.
