The Uncommercial Traveller | Page 4

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 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-in- law,
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
exchange in their pockets, or in belts. Some of these documents,
carefully unwrinkled and dried, were little less fresh in appearance that
day, than the present page will be under ordinary circumstances, after
having been opened three or four times.
In that lonely place, it had not been easy to obtain even such common
commodities in towns, as ordinary disinfectants. Pitch had been burnt
in the church, as the readiest thing at hand, and the frying-pan in which
it had bubbled over a brazier of coals was still there, with its ashes.
Hard by the Communion-Table, were some boots that had been taken
off the drowned and preserved--a gold-digger's boot, cut down the leg
for its removal--a trodden- down man's ankle-boot with a buff cloth
top--and others--soaked and sandy, weedy and salt.
From the church, we passed out into the churchyard. Here, there lay, at
that time, one hundred and forty-five bodies, that had come ashore from
the wreck. He had buried them, when not identified, in graves
containing four each. He had numbered each body in a register
describing it, and had placed a corresponding number on each coffin,
and over each grave. Identified bodies he had buried singly, in private
graves, in another part of the church-yard. Several bodies had been
exhumed from the graves of four, as relatives had come from a distance
and seen his register; and, when recognised, these