It was in the year 1585 – for the event is most carefully recorded in a manuscript of the period – that some fishermen of Skinningrove caught a Sea Man. This was such an astounding fact to record that the writer of the old manuscript explains that ‘old men that would be loath to have their credyt crakt by a tale of the stale date, report confidently that… a sea-man was taken by the fishers.’ They took him up to an old disused house, and kept him there for many weeks, feeding him on raw fish, because he persistently refused the other sorts of food offered him. To the people who flocked from far and near to visit him he was very courteous, and he seems to have been particularly pleased with any ‘fayre maydes’ who visited him, for he would gaze at them with a very earnest countenance, ‘as if his phlegmaticke breaste had been touched with a sparke of love.’ The Sea Man was so well behaved that the fisher-folk began to feel sufficiently sure of his desire to live with them to cease to keep watch on his movements. ‘One day,’ we are told, ‘he prively stoale out of Doores, and ere he coulde be overtaken recovered the sea, whereinto he plunged himself; yet as one that woulde not unmanerly depart without taking of his leave, from the mydle upwardes he raysed his shoulders often above the waves, and makinge signes of acknowledgeing his good entertainment to such as beheld him on the shore, as they interpreted yt; – after a pretty while he dived downe and appeared no more.’
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THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT 
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