scenes and terrible shipwrecks have taken place here, as everywhere along our wild north-east coast.  The Bondicar rocks, by Hauxley, and the cruel spikes of the reef at Snab Point, near Cresswell, have betrayed many a gallant little vessel to her doom.  Not, however, without bringing on many an occasion proof of the courage which is shown as a matter of course by the fisher folk on our coasts.  At Newbiggin, and Cresswell, for instance, deeds have been done, which, in their simple unassuming heroism, may be taken as typical of the hardy race which could count Grace Darling among its daughters.

About thirty years ago, a ship drove ashore off Cresswell one bitter night in January, and the fisher folk crowded down to the shore, watching with sorrowful eyes the hapless crew clinging to their unfortunate vessel, which was slowly being broken up by the waves.  There was no lifeboat at Cresswell then, and all the men of the village, except the old men who were past work, had gone northward, when the oncoming storm prevented their return.  The women and girls heard the cries of the schooner’s crew, and mourned to each other their inability to help.  But one gallant-hearted girl, named Peggy Brown, cried out, “If I thowt she could hing on a bit, I wad be away for the lifeboat.”  But between them and Newbiggin, the nearest lifeboat station, the Lyne Burn runs into the sea, and spreads widely out over the sands; and the older people told Peggy she could never cross the burn in the dark.  She set off, however, the thought of the drowning men hastening her on.  For four miles she made her way in the storm and darkness, partly along the shore, scrambling over rock’s, and wading waist-deep through the Lyne Burn and one or two other places where the waves had driven far up the sands, and partly across Newbiggin Moor, where the icy wind tore at her in her drenched clothing.  She pressed on, however, and managed to reach the coxswain’s house and give her message.  The lifeboat was immediately run out, and the men reached the wreck in time to save all the crew except one, who had been washed overboard.

On another occasion one of the fishermen, named Tom Brown, was preparing to go out, with the help of his two sons, in his own fishing coble to the aid of a ship in distress on the reef.  A carter had come down to the beach, the better to watch the progress of events, and, terrified by the thundering waves, his horse took fright, and in its plunging drove the cart against the little boat, making a hole clear through one side.  “Big Tom,” as he was generally called, merely took off his coat, rolled it into a bundle and stuffed it against the hole.  Then he beckoned to another fisherman, saying to him “Sit on that.”  The man clambered in, and without the loss of another minute these four heroes set off to save their fellow creatures’ lives, with a broken and leaking boat in a heavy sea.  And they did it, reaching the brig only just in time, for it went to pieces a few minutes after the shivering crew had been safely landed.