HAUNTS OF THE SHEARWATER 221 



them we immediately wore our yacht and layed our 

 head to y e westward, crouding all y e saile we could to 

 weather y e rocks under our lee ; we filled full and full, 

 and by God's mercy we got clear of them all, for w** 

 deliverance God's holy name be blest and praised.' 



After seeing on the spot the relative positions of the 

 rocks on which the Association went to pieces, and the 

 bay in which Sir Cloudesley's body was cast up, and 

 the nature of the intervening miles of sea and rock, it 

 is not easy to believe that he could have reached the 

 shore alive. It seems more probable that the murder 

 to which the miserable woman, who first found, and no 

 doubt robbed the body on the beach at the back of St. 

 Mary's, confessed on her deathbed, was the creation of 

 a conscience-stricken imagination. 



The theft of a ring from the finger of a shipwrecked 

 sailor in those days would not under ordinary circum- 

 stances have been likely to trouble much the conscience 

 of a Cornish or Scilly Island woman. But it was not 

 an ordinary circumstance for a girl to see the body of 

 a man she had secretly robbed, buried, as she supposed, 

 for good and all in the white sand of the bank at the 

 head of the little bay by Holy Vale, in the grave on 

 which, tradition says, grass has never since grown, and 

 then to see him dug up again to be recognised as the 

 great admiral, and carried off at the Queen's express 

 command to be embalmed at Plymouth and placed 

 under marble in Westminster Abbey. The haunting 

 memory of the movement of a powerless arm in the 

 wash on the beach, or the flap of a coat-tail in the 



