Michael Penguyne: Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast

As the sun rose over the Lizard, the southernmost point of old England, his rays fell on the tanned sails of a fleet of boats bounding lightly across the heaving waves before a fresh westerly breeze. The distant shore, presenting a line of tall cliffs, towards which the boats were steering, still lay in the deepest shade.

Each boat was laden with a large heap of nets and several baskets filled with brightly-shining fish.

In the stern of one, tiller in hand, sat a strongly-built man, whose deeply-furrowed countenance and grizzled hair showed that he had been for many a year a toiler on the ocean. By his side was a boy of about twelve years of age, dressed in flushing coat and sou’wester, busily employed with a marline-spike, in splicing an eye to a rope’s-end.

The elder fisherman, now looking up at his sails, now stooping down to get a glance beneath them at the shore, and then turning his head towards the south-west, where heavy clouds were gathering fast, meanwhile cast an approving look at the boy.

“Ye are turning in that eye smartly and well, Michael,” he said. “Whatever you do, try and do it in that fashion. It has been my wish to teach you what is right as well as I know it. Try not only to please man, my boy, but to love and serve God, whose eye is always on you. Don’t forget the golden rule either: ‘Do to others as you would they should do to you.’”