The Legend of the Golden Chair
The wind dropped like a stone. Then the fires of hell burst down over Grouville Bay. Dusk was falling fast, a gathering gloom, and the last fishing boat was hauling in its nets for the night.
by Paul Darroch
The hunger for more proves to be the death of men: that was the not-so-hidden message of many a Renaissance tragedy. In an age of the untamed printing press, when popular reformations and revolutions spread like wildfire, human greed was a subversive force. The Governors of Jersey required all of Her Majesty’s subjects to stay within the shackles of their ordained rank, to preserve the brittle social order of the realm.
This morality tale is based on a story first published by William Creed on March 22, 1595. It was first published in London, for a metropolitan audience, and despite its specific setting in the bay of Grouville, its Jersey origins are unclear. We do not know if the author, like Shakespeare himself, had simply appropriated an exotic locale for dramatic effect. Alternatively, this may have been a genuine Jersey sea story that found an audience in England’s capital, at the zenith of Queen Elizabeth’s seafaring age.
Grouville Bay, Jersey, Summer 1594
The wind dropped like a stone. Then the fires of hell burst down over Grouville Bay. Dusk was falling fast, a gathering gloom, and the last fishing boat was hauling in its nets for the night. They were almost empty; it had been a foul catch. The boat masters Dansie and Doughton were barking at their sullen crew, when suddenly their jaws dropped, and they whimpered like puppies.
A dragon’s flame was searing across the heavens, a terrifying surge of clean electric blue. The blackened horizon shone brightly for one moment, just like the sun before an eclipse. The sea fizzled with a strong acrid smell of burning. The shipmen fell to their knees in terror. Then the sky collapsed into darkness.
Something was stirring high above the bay. A silent armada was rising over the horizon, but it bore no sails. A flotilla of spheres glowed like lanterns in the sky, with an eerie violet light, pulsing with unearthly energy. They hung there like beautiful, fearsome omens.
Yet all the rest of the world remained still, as if frozen in a dream. Smoke still spilled up from the great grey keep on the heights of Gorey, that mailed fist jutting out towards the Norman coast. The waves continued to lap against the gentle Grouville shore, as gentle as a mother’s caress. The beach glistened brightly in the indigo light.
“The fire of Saint Elmo!”, whispered the master in awe. Dansie and Doughton were rough men, who spent their days scouring the Duke’s seas for fat eels. Dansie was a ruinous peacock of a man, a cocktail of spite and pride. Doughton was a silent, sturdy bully, who spoke best with his fists. The boat’s two crewmen, who silently worked the nets like convicts, and sweated every day to make their masters rich, despised them both.
The four fishermen stared at the St Elmo’s fire, and then at each other; each one poised somewhere between terror and exultation, fear and astonishment. Then Dansie’s twisted face broke into a rare smile, revealing a brace of rotten teeth, some repaired with soft gold. He declared: “This is a sign of good fortune, boys. Head for the old wreck at once - and haul the nets in afresh”.
At those words, the ghost-lights fled. Then the winds rose, and a storm crashed in, and firecrackers of lightning whipped over the water. The waves were high, and the fishing boat lurched in the storm. Yet the crewmen, drenched and seething with resentment, sailed out one last time, and cast the net.
The nets had torn. The first one was ripped open like a goose at Yuletide. The men eventually hauled the second net in, sweating like oxen, but a great deadweight was holding them back. Their muscles bulged at the exertion, but at last they landed their cargo on the shore. Dansie sauntered over to survey his prize.
At first, draped with tentacles of sea-weed, the nature of this wreck was hard to decipher. Yet even in twilight, and beneath a crust of rust, this catch glimmered. It was a heavy object, of weighty metal. Dansie’s heart clammed up in his chest and the blood drained from his face. This was made of clean, beaten gold. It was the throne of a fallen king.
The men gasped. They had all heard tell of Plato’s Atlantis, and seen the tree-stumps at low tides that ringed the coasts of Jersey. Great kings must have ruled here once, giant men in ancient forests before the Flood drowned the world. Before them lay the astonishing proof.
A miracle had been dragged ashore. Upon closer inspection, the golden throne was carved in the form of a tree, with a hundred intertwined branches rising from the heart-root of the royal bloodline. Yet further up the seat, the leaves became thorns, and the branches had holes and embossed seals, ending in spikes and razor-ridges. Was this an instrument of power or torture, or perhaps both? What beauty had this throne witnessed, and what cruelty?
It mattered not. This treasure could buy a castle; a brace of manor houses; a whole Island. So Dansie and Doughton stepped aside to confer, as thick as thieves. Dansie, a flicker of fear rippling across his soft neck, urged caution: “Let us sell this treasure and give the men a hundred pounds apiece. They know our secret; let us buy their silence”. Yet Doughton was unyielding as a boulder: “These men deserve nothing. Given them a week’s wages and send the fools home to drink it away”.
The boat-men were muttering too, wielding darker oaths and angrier words: “These greedy churls should not deprive us of the treasure. We hauled in the net; we dragged up this treasure. These leeches shall have none of it”.
And without a word, the first meaty crewman grabbed his boathook, a long pike of wood, with a vicious spike at its tip, and plunged it towards his hated masters. Dansie was struck by surprise, and collapsed with barely a whimper, like a broken marionette. Doughton blurted out an oath, but the sheer force of the impact sent him spinning to the ground. Their blood stains mingled deep into the sand, and the rising tide swept their bodies from sight. The golden chair glimmered with pride in the clear moonlight.
Panic leapt in. Murder had been committed; the Bailiff would soon enough string them up like lambs. Where could the guilty crewmen run? They had to head for France.
So, they lugged the heavy throne into the skiff and headed out to the rocks. Yet the going was hard. Somewhere beyond the Ecréhous, a gang of unknown sailors in an unmarked pinnace came alongside. They offered help; a little too effusively, for they had spied the astonishing treasure and sought to claim it as their own. Out in the turbulent sea, daggers were drawn with these strange assailants, and a brief and bloody skirmish erupted. As they veered off away into the night, one of the two Jersey sailors lay dying.
The last surviving fisherman panicked; he could not sail this boat alone. The French shore was looming up fast, so he wrapped the golden chair in a sail and leapt out with it into the choppy brine. It was a madcap gamble. He could not hold his treasure; the weight was too great. The cursed chair slipped back into the waves, plunging back down to the drowned kingdom of the forest.
The next morning, the fisherman was found washed up on the Norman shore, somewhere near Granville. They tried to save him of course, but he was already cut too deep, his limbs pulverised by the reefs. He was utterly delirious, babbling some tale of a golden throne, of a terrible treasure lost under the waves.
At the third watch of night he died, and they buried him by the foreshore, in the stranger’s cemetery. No-one ever learned his name.
This story features in Jersey: Secrets of the Sea which is available on Amazon UK and in Jersey bookshops.
This newsletter is written by Paul Darroch at Open Page Learning Ltd which is registered with the Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner. See our privacy policy.