It is a cruel coast in the winter time, and its children had need be strong men and fearless, for they who make their living on the face of its waters surely inherit a share greater than is their due of toil and danger; they, verily, more than others “see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.”  From earliest times when men first sailed the seas this coast has taken heavy toll of ships and of human lives, and in the race that it has bred, necessarily there has been little room for weaklings; their men are even to this day of the type of the old Vikings—­from whom perhaps they descend—­fair-bearded and strong, blue-eyed and open of countenance.  And their women—­well, there are many who might worthily stand alongside their countrywoman, Grace Darling, many who at a pinch would do what she did, and “blush to find it fame.”

Yet one must admit that, as a whole, this community was not always keen to save ship and crew from the breakers, nor prone to warn vessels off from dangerous reef or sunken rock.  In days long gone by, if all tales are true, the people of these coasts had no good reputation among sailors, and their habits and customs were wont to give rise to much friction and ill-will betwixt England and Scotland.  It is certain that in 1472 they plundered the great foreign-going barge built by Bishop Kennedy of St. Andrews—­the greatest ship ever seen in those days—­when she drove ashore one stormy night off Bamborough.  And of her passengers, one, the Abbot of St. Colomb, was long held to ransom by James Carr, a deed the consequences of which, in those days of an all-powerful Church, might be dreadful to contemplate.  Pitscottie says the “Bishop’s Barge” cost her owner something like L10,000 sterling.  Perhaps the harvest reaped by Bamborough when she came ashore may have encouraged Northumbrians to adopt this line of business in earnest, for by 1559 we read that “wreckers” were common down all that coast; and their prayer:  “Let us pray for a good harvest this winter,” contained no allusion to the fruits of the field.

In 1643 there was a Scottish priest, Gilbert Blakhal, confessor in Paris to the Lady Isabelle Hay, Lord Errol’s daughter, who in the course of a journey to his native land visited Holy Island, and in the account of his travels he makes mention of the ways of the island’s inhabitants, and of their prayer when a vessel was seen to be in danger.  “They al sit downe upon their knees and hold up their handes, and say very devotely, ‘Lord, send her to us.  God, send her to us.’  You, seeing them upon their knees, and their handes joyned, do think that they are praying for your sauvetie; but their myndes are far from that.  They pray, not God to sauve you, or send you to the porte, but to send you to them by ship-wrack, that they may gette the spoile of her.  And to showe that this is their meaning, if the ship come wel to the porte, or eschew naufrage (shipwreck), they gette up in anger, crying:  ’The Devil