The Pilot’s Ghost Story

St Ives Harbour Fish Market: courtesy of https://www.cornwalls.co.uk

 

Another tale from Robert Hunt’s ‘Popular Romances of the West of England, or The Drolls, Superstitions and Traditions of Old Cornwall’ (third edition, 1896) was told orally to Charles Taylor Stephens, a poet and ‘sometime rural postman from St Ives to Zennor’. Hunt employed Stephens to collect stories from remote villages on the assumption that people would more readily tell tales to the friendly postman than to a stranger. 

C. Taylor Stephens' book of poems

This particular story was told to Stephens by a pilot whose job it was to meet ships and guide them into port. In this tale he guides the sloop Sally from St Ives to Hayle, approximately five miles up the coast.

Robert Hunt often altered stories ‘from the vernacular – in which they were for the most part related – into modern language’, but says of this one, ‘I prefer giving this story in the words in which it was communicated. For its singular character, it is a ghost story well worth preserving.’ 

Here it is, in what is (mostly) the pilot's own words.

 

Just seventeen years since*, I went down on the wharf from my house one night [between] about twelve and one in the morning, to see whether there was any ‘hobble,’* and found a sloop, the Sally of St Ives (the Sally was wrecked at St Ives one Saturday afternoon in the spring of 1862) in the bay, bound for Hayle.

When I got by the White Hart public-house, I saw a man leaning against a post on the wharf – I spoke to him, wished him good morning, and asked him what o’ clock it was, but to no purpose. I was not to be easily frightened, for I didn’t believe in ghosts, and finding I got no answer to my repeated inquiries, I approached close to him and said, ‘Thee’rt a queer sort of fellow, not to speak; I’d speak to the devil, if he were to speak to me. Who art a at all? thee’st needn’t think to frighten me: that thee wasn’t do, if thou wert twice so ugly; who art a at all?’

He turned his great ugly face on me, glared abroad his great eyes, opened his mouth, and it was a mouth sure ’nuff. Then I saw pieces of sea-weed and bits of sticks in his whiskers; the flesh of his face and hands were parboiled, just like a woman’s hands after a good day’s washing. Well, I did not like his looks a bit, and sheered off; but he followed close by my side, and I could hear the water squashing in his shoes every step he took.

Well, I stopped a bit, and thought I would be civil to him, and spoke to him again, but no answer. I then thought I would go to seek for another of our crew, and knock him up to get the vessel, and had got about fifty or sixty yards, when I turned to see if he was following me, but saw him where I left him.

Fearing he would come after me, I ran for my life the few steps that I had to go. But when I got to the door, to my horror there stood the man in the door, grinning horribly. I shook like an aspen leaf; my hat lifted from my head; the sweat boiled out of me. What to do I didn’t know, and in the house there was such a row, as if everybody was breaking up everything. After a bit I went in, for the door was on the latch [ie: not locked] – and called the captain of the boat, and got light, but everything was all right, not had he heard any noise.

We went out aboard of the Sally and I put her into Hayle but I felt ill enough to be in bed. I left the vessel to come home as soon as I could, but it took me four hours to walk two miles, and I had to lie down in the road, and was taken home to St Ives in a cart; as far as the Terrace* from there I was carried home by my brothers and put to bed. Three days afterwards all my hair fell out as if I had had my head shaved. The roots, and about half an inch from the roots, being quite white. I was ill six months, and doctor’s bill was £4, 17s. 6d. for attendance and medicine. So you see I have reason to believe in the existence of spirits as well as Mr Wesley* had. My hair grew again, and twelve months after I had as good a head of dark-brown hair as ever.

 

Notes:

* ‘Just seventeen years since’:  Stephens, to whom it was told, died in 1865, so the events of the story must have occurred by 1848 or earlier.

* ‘hobble’ – dialect word a Cornish glossary says is ‘the share each person received when the vessel was brought in - or perhaps when the catch was sold.’ The sense here seems to be ‘a share of any work to do’?

* ‘The Terrace’ is a street in St Ives with views over the bay.                  

* The preacher John Wesley believed in the existence of ghosts and other spirits.

The Unhappy Love Affair Of Giant Bolster

 

 

This is a tale told in Robert Hunt’s ‘Popular Romances of the West of England, or The Drolls, Superstitions and Traditions of Old Cornwall’. First published in 1865 it went into three editions and was illustrated by George Cruikshank, of whom more below. The third edition begins with a selection of tales about some of the many Cornish giants. This particular one was called Bolster. Like most giants he was a disreputable character, but unlike most giants he fell madly in love with the local St Agnes. He was in fact a sort of giant stalker, but I’m not sure which of the pair I disapprove of most – him, or her.

Bolster must have been a giant of enormous size, since it is stated that he could stand with one foot on St Agnes’ Beacon and the other on Carn Brea; these hills being distant, as the bird flies, six miles. In proof of this, there still exists in the valley running upwards from Chapel Porth, a stone in which may be seen the impression of the giant’s fingers. On one occasion, while enjoying his usual stride from the Beacon to Carn Brea, Bolster felt thirsty and stooped to drink out of the well at Chapel Porth, resting while he did so on the above-mentioned stone.

We hear but little of the wives of our giants, but Bolster had a wife, who was made to labour hard by her tyrannical husband. On the top of St Agnes’ Beacon there yet exist the evidences of the useless labours to which this unfortunate giantess was doomed, in grouped masses of small stones gathered from an estate at the bottom of this hill [which] whenever Bolster was angry with his wife, he compelled her to [...] carry in her apron to the top...

Be this as it may, the giant Bolster fell deeply in love with St Agnes, who is reputed to have been singularly beautiful and a pattern of virtue. The giant allowed the lady no repose. He followed her incessantly, proclaiming his love and filling the air with the tempests of his sighs and groans. St Agnes lectured Bolster in vain on the impropriety of his conduct, he being already a married man. This availed not [and] the persecuted lady, finding there was no release for her while this monster existed, resolved to be rid of him at any cost, and eventually succeeded by the following stratagem.

Agnes appeared at last to be persuaded of the intensity of the giant’s love, but she told him she required one small proof more. There exists at Chapel Porth a hole in the cliff at the end of the valley. If Bolster would fill this hole with his blood, the lady would no longer look coldly on him.

The huge bestrider-of-hills thought it was an easy thing which was asked of him: he could fill many such holes and be none the weaker for loss of blood. Stretching his great arm across the hole, he plunged a knife into a vein, and a torrent of gore rushed forth. Roaring and seething, the blood fell to the bottom, and the giant expected to see the hole filled in a matter of moments. Yet it required much more blood than Bolster had supposed: still, in a short time it must be filled, so he bled on. Hour after hour the blood flowed from the vein, and the hole was not filled. Eventually the giant fainted from exhaustion. The strength of life within his mighty frame enabled him to rally, but he had no power to lift himself from the ground and was unable to staunch the wound he had made. So it was, that after many throes, the giant Bolster died!

In proposing this task, the cunning saint was well aware that the hole opened at the bottom into the sea, and as rapidly as the blood flowed into the hole it was washed away. Thus, the lady got rid of her lover, Mrs Bolster was released, and the district freed from its tyrant. The hole at Chapel Porth still retains the evidence of this tradition, in the red stain which marks the track down which flowed the giant’s blood.

A footnote to this story takes us to an amusing letter written by the artist George Cruikshank to the book’s publisher Mr Hotten. Cross swords with an artist at your peril:

 

                                                                        263 Hampstead Rd, N.W., April 18^th, 1865

Dear Mr. Hotten, – I have received your note, in which you express a doubt as to whether some portion of the public will understand my representation of the giant “Bolster”.

            To all such persons, I would beg them to reflect, that if a giant could stride six miles across a country, he must be twelve miles in height, according to the proportions of the human figure. In order to get a sight of the head of such a giant, the spectator must be distant a mile or two from the figure. This would, by adding half the “stride” and above eleven miles perpendicular, place the spectator about fifteen miles distant from the giant’s head, which head, in proportion to other parts of the body, would be about three-quarters of a mile measuring from the chin to the crown of the head. Now, let anyone calculate, according to the laws of perspective, what size such a head would be at such a distance. To give a little insight into the matter of perspective, let anyone imagine they are looking down a street, fifteen miles long, of large houses, and then calculate what size the last house would be at the farther end of the street; and it must therefore be recollected that every part of such a huge body must lessen in the same way – body and limbs – smaller by degrees, if not beautifully less.

            I selected this subject from my friend Robert Hunt’s work as one of the numerous proofs, which are shown in both the volumes, of the horrible dark ignorance of the Early Ages – a large amount of which ignorance and darkness, I am sorry to find, still remains.

            I hope that these few lines will explain satisfactorily why Giant “Bolster” has been thus displayed by, – Yours truly, George Cruikshank.

PS. – The first time that I put a very large figure in perspective was about forty years back, in illustrating that part of “Paradise Lost” where Milton describes Satan as

                        “Prone on the flood, extended long and large,

                          Lay floating many a rood.”

This I never published, but possibly I may do so one of these days.