Coda to this post:
On the morning of Wednesday 19th January, 1881, the ship Visitor foundered in Robin Hood’s Bay. The crew took to a small boat but could not come ashore due to the notoriously treacherous rocks of the Bay. As the crew battled to stay afloat in heavy seas and snow blizzards, the vicar of Fylingdales, Jermyn Cooper, sent a telegram to the Whitby Harbourmaster, requesting immediate assistance.
An attempt was made to launch the Whitby lifeboat but the atrocious weather made it impossible. Knowing that the crew of the Visitor were in desperate peril, it was decided that the lifeboat would be carried overland to Robin Hood’s Bay instead, an 8-mile journey across hills covered in 6-foot high snowdrifts. Fifty pairs of horses, supplied in relays by farmers along the route, shared the task of hauling the boat from Whitby to the Bay. Women and children held lanterns as men hacked at the snowdrifts, tearing down walls and hedges that stood in the lifeboat’s path. Finally the lifeboat was manhandled down an icy slope into the sea. A local man, John Skelton, waded out into the Bay and guided the lifeboat safely through the narrow channel from the harbour. The crew of the Visitor had given up all hope and did not at first realise that they were being rescued.
The coxswain of the Whitby lifeboat that day was one Henry Freeman, the sole survivor of the lifeboat tragedy 20 years before.
