thawed. It was a mistake (my friend was glad to tell me, on the
way) to suppose that the peasantry had shown any superstitious
avoidance of the drowned; on the whole, they had done very well,
and had assisted readily. Ten shillings had been paid for the
bringing of each body up to the church, but the way was steep, and
a horse and cart (in which it was wrapped in a sheet) were
necessary, and three or four men, and, all things considered, it
was not a great price. The people were none the richer for the
wreck, for it was the season of the herring-shoal – and who could
cast nets for fish, and find dead men and women in the draught?
He had the church keys in his hand, and opened the churchyard gate,
and opened the church door; and we went in.
It is a little church of great antiquity; there is reason to
believe that some church has occupied the spot, these thousand
years or more. The pulpit was gone, and other things usually
belonging to the church were gone, owing to its living congregation
having deserted it for the neighbouring school-room, and yielded it
up to the dead. The very Commandments had been shouldered out of
their places, in the bringing in of the dead; the black wooden
tables on which they were painted, were askew, and on the stone
pavement below them, and on the stone pavement all over the church,
were the marks and stains where the drowned had been laid down.
The eye, with little or no aid from the imagination, could yet see
how the bodies had been turned, and where the head had been and
where the feet. Some faded traces of the wreck of the Australian
ship may be discernible on the stone pavement of this little
church, hundreds of years hence, when the digging for gold in
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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
Australia shall have long and long ceased out of the land.
Forty-four shipwrecked men and women lay here at one time, awaiting
burial. Here, with weeping and wailing in every room of his house,
my companion worked alone for hours, solemnly surrounded by eyes
that could not see him, and by lips that could not speak to him,
patiently examining the tattered clothing, cutting off buttons,
hair, marks from linen, anything that might lead to subsequent
identification, studying faces, looking for a scar, a bent finger,
a crooked toe, comparing letters sent to him with the ruin about
him. ‘My dearest brother had bright grey eyes and a pleasant
smile,’ one sister wrote. O poor sister! well for you to be far
from here, and keep that as your last remembrance of him!
The ladies of the clergyman’s family, his wife and two sisters-inlaw,
came in among the bodies often. It grew to be the business of
their lives to do so. Any new arrival of a bereaved woman would
stimulate their pity to compare the description brought, with the
dread realities. Sometimes, they would go back able to say, ‘I
have found him,’ or, ‘I think she lies there.’ Perhaps, the
mourner, unable to bear the sight of all that lay in the church,
would be led in blindfold. Conducted to the spot with many
compassionate words, and encouraged to look, she would say, with a
piercing cry, ‘This is my boy!’ and drop insensible on the
insensible figure.
He soon observed that in some cases of women, the identification of
persons, though complete, was quite at variance with the marks upon
the linen; this led him to notice that even the marks upon the
linen were sometimes inconsistent with one another; and thus he
came to understand that they had dressed in great haste and
agitation, and that their clothes had become mixed together. The
identification of men by their dress, was rendered extremely
difficult, in consequence of a large proportion of them being
dressed alike – in clothes of one kind, that is to say, supplied by
slopsellers and outfitters, and not made by single garments but by
hundreds. Many of the men were bringing over parrots, and had
receipts upon them for the price of the birds; others had bills of