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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Cornish Characters and Strange Events," S. Baring-Gould weaves a captivating tapestry of folklore, local anecdotes, and richly drawn character studies, presenting the unique social fabric of Cornwall in the late 19th century. Drawing upon his extensive ethnographic research, Baring-Gould employs a vibrant literary style that seamlessly blends narrative storytelling with observational prowess. This collection not only explores the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of Cornish life but also serves as an invaluable record of regional dialects, superstitions, and the enchanting landscapes that shape its cultural identity. S. Baring-Gould, a prolific Victorian author and scholar, was deeply rooted in both Cornwall's rich heritage and its spirited communities. His familiarity with this region stems from his upbringing and continued residence, affording him profound insights into the lives of its inhabitants. Baring-Gould's literary career spanned various genres, but his passion for folklore and local history notably influenced his choice to chronicle these remarkable characters and their remarkable tales, making them accessible to a wider audience. This book is a must-read for those interested in regional folklore, cultural studies, or Victorian literature. Baring-Gould's keen observations and engaging prose invite readers to immerse themselves in the extraordinary yet ordinary lives of Cornish people, encouraging a deeper appreciation for the unique tapestry of local history and character. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Cornish Characters and Strange Events
Table of Contents
Introduction
Threaded through rugged coasts, deep mines, and village lanes, this book examines how a distinctive corner of Britain remembers itself—by celebrating singular lives and recording the strange eruptions of fate that press ordinary experience into legend.
Cornish Characters and Strange Events is a work of regional nonfiction by S. Baring-Gould, an English clergyman, antiquarian, and author known for exploring local history and folklore. Focused on Cornwall in the far southwest of England, it gathers biographical sketches and accounts of unusual happenings rooted in the county’s landscapes and communities. Issued in the early twentieth century, it participates in an Edwardian appetite for county studies and character portraits, situating Cornish distinctiveness within a broader national curiosity about regional cultures, their customs, and the stories they cultivate to explain resilience, reputation, and social memory.
The premise is straightforward yet inviting: a series of narrative profiles and event-driven vignettes that balance anecdote with historical framing. Readers encounter an essayistic voice—curious, measured, and occasionally arch—shaped by an antiquarian’s eye for telling detail. Rather than building a single plot, the book composes a mosaic of episodes, each illuminating a facet of Cornish life. The mood ranges from reflective to briskly dramatic, with moments of quiet humor and brushes with the uncanny. The result is less a chronicle of dates than a guided walk through memory, where character, place, and circumstance meet in revealing ways.
Across its pages, questions of identity, reputation, and moral judgment recur: how communities weigh rumor against record; how hardship, isolation, and opportunity foster ingenuity; how the sea and the subterranean world of tin and copper shape temperament and hazard alike. The interplay between fact and folklore remains central, not to blur truth but to show how stories endure when they answer a need. Readers today may find in these themes a mirror for debates about localness, the uses of history, and the ways extraordinary incidents are recruited to explain, console, or warn a community facing change.
Baring-Gould writes as a collector and arranger, drawing on local lore and historical anecdotes while providing context that anchors the striking or the odd within everyday life. He juxtaposes remembered scenes, reported incidents, and character sketches to let patterns emerge—of social aspiration, maritime peril, pastoral endurance, and civic pride. The method invites readers to listen for echoes between past and present: how a reputation is made or unmade, how an episode ripples through a parish, how the dramatic and the domestic intertwine. The emphasis falls on intelligible human motives rather than sensational mystery.
Cornwall appears not as a backdrop but as an active presence, its peninsular geography concentrating weather, work, and worldviews. Ports, market towns, moors, and cliff paths become stages on which resourcefulness, eccentricity, and communal bonds are tested. The book’s sensitivity to setting highlights how custom and livelihood—fishing, farming, trade, mining—inform character and choice. For contemporary readers, this attention to place anticipates modern microhistory and cultural geography, inviting a mode of reading that values texture over spectacle and encourages an empathetic regard for the local without dissolving it into stereotype.
Approached with curiosity and critical poise, Cornish Characters and Strange Events offers a richly atmospheric introduction to a region told through its people and the episodes that made them memorable. It promises encounters with voices from different walks of life, observed with a steady, occasionally wry, moral sensibility characteristic of its era. The attraction lies not in definitive answers but in patterns of lived experience, where the remarkable clarifies the everyday. For those seeking a thoughtful companion to Cornwall’s past—and a study in how communities narrate themselves—this book provides an engaging, measured, and enduring guide.
Synopsis (Selection)
S. Baring-Gould’s Cornish Characters and Strange Events gathers concise portraits of notable people and accounts of unusual happenings to sketch a composite history of Cornwall. Drawing on parish registers, family papers, local chronicles, and oral tradition, the author arranges his material broadly by period and theme. He begins by situating Cornwall’s distinct identity—linguistic, religious, and geographic—and explaining how its peninsular isolation shaped community life, professions, and belief. The book’s method is cumulative: brief biographical sketches and incident narratives build into a regional panorama, with dates, places, and sources anchoring stories otherwise prone to embellishment. The result is a chronological, anecdotal survey of character and event.
The opening chapters move to Cornwall’s early Christian centuries, summarizing the arrival of Celtic missionaries and the foundation of local oratories and parishes. Baring-Gould notes how saints’ dedications and place-names preserve memory where documents are sparse, and he distinguishes recurring hagiographic motifs from plausible biography. He outlines traditions attached to holy wells, pilgrim routes, and churchtown fairs, showing how spiritual authority intertwined with settlement and law. Early tribal leaders, monastic patrons, and local customs are set in context, establishing patterns of leadership and piety that recur in later episodes. These foundations prepare readers for the book’s alternating rhythm of personal sketch and notable occurrence.
From the medieval period into the Tudor age, the narrative turns to gentry houses and maritime enterprise. Families such as the Grenvilles, Killigrews, Arundells, Godolphins, and Trelawnys appear in brisk vignettes that link household alliances to national events. Baring-Gould outlines coastal defense, port development, and the ambiguous boundaries between privateering, piracy, and licensed war at sea. He marks feuds, marriages, and patronage that shaped local influence, and comments on lawlessness and order in a landscape of creeks and headlands. The treatment remains factual and compressed, emphasizing names, dates, and episodes that illustrate how Cornish fortunes rose with court favor, trade, and naval service.
Seventeenth-century chapters concentrate on conflict and conscience, particularly during the Civil Wars. Figures like Sir Bevil Grenville are placed against engagements such as Stratton and the defense of strategic strongholds, while the county’s divided loyalties are summarized without polemic. Ecclesiastical controversy enters with the Trelawny case and the broader question of episcopal authority, legal process, and public sentiment. Baring-Gould notes how military disruption affected ports, parishes, and estates, and how wartime exigencies fed long-running patterns of clandestine trade. The section balances battlefield chronicle with domestic consequence, portraying a society that endured upheaval yet retained local solidarities rooted in kinship, parish, and sea.
The narrative shifts to the long eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, highlighting science, art, religion, and eccentricity. Brief lives of Sir Humphry Davy, Richard Trevithick, and John Opie mark Cornish contributions to chemistry, engineering, and painting. The Methodist revival’s progress through moorland and coast is sketched via visits, preaching places, and miners’ responses, emphasizing discipline, mutual aid, and altered habits. Clerical and lay personalities—some austere, some unconventional—are presented for their public work or memorable traits. Baring-Gould’s method remains documentary, using letters and local testimony to connect celebrated achievements with parish realities, and to show how innovation and devotion coexisted in a laboring, maritime society.
Mining receives sustained attention as the county’s defining industry. The book summarizes tin and copper districts, the adventurer system, engine houses, and the organization of labor above and below ground. Accidents, sudden floods, and technical rescues provide the “strange events” of the lodes, while price swings, strikes, and closures shape family fortunes. Women’s work on the surface and the formation of chapels, reading rooms, and benefit clubs illustrate social frameworks around the mines. Emigration emerges as a recurring outcome, with Cornish miners carrying skills to other hemispheres. Baring-Gould links names and places to illustrate how enterprise, risk, and community interdependence marked mining life.
Coast and sea furnish another sequence of incidents and characters. Storms, groundings, and cliff rescues are recorded with dates and locations, underscoring the perils of headlands like the Lizard and Land’s End. The author treats wrecking tales cautiously, distinguishing criminal depredation from salvage custom and rumor; smuggling likewise appears as a practiced economy meeting determined enforcement. Lighthouse building, lifeboat crews, pilots, and preventive men introduce figures of routine courage. Individual captains, fishermen, and villagers are sketched briefly for presence of mind or misadventure, while coastal topography explains recurring hazards. These chapters emphasize disciplined seamanship and communal response to maritime crisis.
A concluding thematic sweep gathers folklore, marvels, and legal curiosities. Legends of giants, piskies, mermaids, and haunted moors appear alongside court records and parish anecdotes, with the author noting variant forms and likely origins. Saints’ processions, seasonal customs, and well-side rites are described as living or recollected practice, not isolated curios. Certain “strange events” blend belief and evidence—mysterious sounds, apparitions, or prodigies—positioned within a careful register of sources. The result is not credulity or dismissal but a catalogue that sets narrative tradition beside documented occurrence, showing how landscape features, work routines, and inherited stories sustained a distinctive imaginative world.
The book closes by returning to its central purpose: to preserve, in compact lives and episode notes, a record of Cornish individuality within wider English history. Across saints and gentry, engineers and preachers, miners and mariners, Baring-Gould emphasizes factual anchors—names, dates, places—while allowing memorable events to convey texture. The overarching message is continuity through adaptation: a people shaped by granite uplands, perilous coasts, and deep mines, meeting change without surrendering identity. By arranging sketches in historical sequence and grouping related themes, the volume offers readers a coherent, briskly paced survey of character and circumstance, and a reference point for local memory and national context.
Historical Context
S. Baring-Gould’s Cornish Characters and Strange Events, published in 1909, surveys Cornwall as a distinctive borderland of the British Isles, bounded by the Atlantic and the Channel and anchored by mining districts such as Camborne-Redruth, ports like Falmouth and Fowey, and moorland parishes around Bodmin. Though compiled in the Edwardian period, the narratives range from the late medieval era to the nineteenth century, drawing on parish registers, assize papers, Admiralty reports, and oral tradition. The book’s setting is thus both geographical and chronological: it maps a remote peninsula whose communities were repeatedly tested by taxation, religious change, civil war, industrialization, and maritime danger, rendering local character inseparable from national events.
The 1497 Cornish Rebellion arose from Henry VII’s levy to fund war against Scotland. Cornish leaders Michael An Gof, a blacksmith of St Keverne, and Thomas Flamank, a Bodmin lawyer, led thousands from Bodmin toward London, passing through Somerset and Wiltshire before defeat at Deptford Bridge (Blackheath) in mid-June 1497 by forces under Lord Daubeney. Executions followed in London later that month. In September 1497, Perkin Warbeck landed at Whitesand Bay, rallied Cornish support, and advanced on Exeter before dispersal at Taunton. Baring-Gould treats these episodes as foundational expressions of Cornish resistance to distant fiscal and political authority, preserving names, routes, and local memories that persisted in parish lore.
The Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, also called the Western Rising, opposed the Act of Uniformity and the imposition of the English Book of Common Prayer under Edward VI. Cornwall, where many still spoke Cornish, saw unrest anticipated by the 1548 killing at Helston of William Body, a royal agent for religious change. In 1549 Humphrey Arundell of Lanherne commanded rebel forces that besieged Exeter. Government troops under Lord John Russell, reinforced by foreign mercenaries, crushed the rising at Clyst Heath and other engagements in July–August 1549, with thousands killed. Baring-Gould links named gentry, parishes, and battle sites to a wider narrative of confessional policy and the defense of local language and rite.
Civil War profoundly marked Cornwall between 1642 and 1646. Royalists under Sir Ralph Hopton won at Braddock Down (19 January 1643) and Stratton (16 May 1643), establishing Cornish prowess in the western theater. Sir Bevil Grenville, a celebrated Cornish Royalist, fell at Lansdowne near Bath on 5 July 1643. In 1644 the Royalists trapped the Earl of Essex at Lostwithiel, where Parliamentarian infantry surrendered in early September. Pendennis Castle at Falmouth, governed by Sir John Arundell of Trerice, held out until August 1646 among the last Royalist garrisons. Baring-Gould’s portraits of Grenville and Arundell, and his reconstruction of marches and sieges, present civil conflict as a crucible of county loyalty and leadership.
Eighteenth-century coastal economies bred smuggling and dramatic rescues. The Carters of Prussia Cove, notably John Carter, the so-called King of Prussia, organized large-scale free-trade operations in the 1770s–1790s from coves east of Penzance, clashing with excise cutters and customs officers. The wreck of HMS Anson on 28 December 1807 at Loe Bar near Porthleven, with heavy loss of life, galvanized Henry Trengrouse of Helston to design a life-saving rocket apparatus he demonstrated to the Admiralty in 1818. Baring-Gould gathers depositions, local testimony, and coastal topography to depict clandestine landings, fatal storms, and innovations born of tragedy, making maritime peril and resourcefulness central to his catalogue of strange events.
Cornwall’s mining revolution shaped society from the late eighteenth century. Richard Trevithick of Camborne pioneered high-pressure steam, building a road locomotive in 1801 and advancing pumping engines vital to deep tin and copper mines at Dolcoath and across Gwennap’s Copper Kingdom. Humphry Davy of Penzance achieved the safety lamp in 1815 and advanced electrochemistry, while William Bickford of Tuckingmill patented the safety fuse in 1831, reducing blasting deaths. Disasters, such as the East Wheal Rose flood of 9 July 1846 that drowned 39 miners, punctuated boom-bust cycles and spurred emigration of Cousin Jacks to South Australia, the United States, and Mexico. Baring-Gould profiles engineers, inventors, and miners to embed technical change within perilous labor.
Religious revival transformed Cornish life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. John Wesley first preached in St Ives in 1743 and thereafter repeatedly addressed vast gatherings at Gwennap Pit near Redruth, strengthening Methodist societies among miners and fishers. The Bible Christians, founded by William O’Bryan in 1815, grew rapidly in North Cornwall and beyond, encouraging literacy, temperance, and mutual aid. Earlier confessional struggles surface in the 1688 Trial of the Seven Bishops, including Cornish-born Jonathan Trelawny, whose acquittal became a county touchstone later celebrated in song. Baring-Gould’s sketches of preachers, patrons, and parishes chart how evangelical organization reconfigured kinship, discipline, and political attitudes within Cornish communities.
By assembling biographies and incidents across centuries, the book implicitly critiques structural inequities shaping Cornwall. It exposes the human cost of state policies, from punitive taxation in 1497 to the suppression of a vernacular rite in 1549, and scrutinizes the militarization that emptied granaries and parishes during civil war. Industrial chapters highlight hazardous labor, speculative capital, and uneven relief in mining districts, while coastal narratives weigh customs enforcement against livelihoods and lifesaving. Baring-Gould’s attention to parish institutions, dissenting chapels, and local gentry reveals class stratification and patronage networks, yet also documents communal resilience, thereby casting Cornwall’s margins as a vantage point from which to judge metropolitan neglect and injustice.
Cornish Characters and Strange Events
PREFACE
Cornwall, peopled mainly by Celts, but with an infusion of English blood, stands and always has stood apart from the rest of England, much, but in a less degree, as has Wales. That which brought it into more intimate association with English thought, interests, and progress was the loss of the old Cornish tongue.
The isolation in which Cornwall had stood has tended to develop in it much originality of character; and the wildness of the coast has bred a hardy race of seamen and smugglers; the mineral wealth, moreover, drew thousands of men underground, and the underground life of the mines has a peculiar effect on mind and character: it is cramping in many ways, but it tends to develop a good deal of religious enthusiasm, that occasionally breaks forth in wild forms of fanaticism. Cornwall has produced admirable sailors, men who have won deathless renown in warfare at sea, as "Old Dreadnought" Boscawen, Pellew, Lord Exmouth, etc., and daring and adventurous smugglers, like "The King of Prussia," who combined great religious fervour with entire absence of scruple in the matter of defrauding the king's revenue. It has produced men of science who have made for themselves a world-fame, as Adams the astronomer, and Sir Humphry Davy the chemist; men who have been benefactors to their race, as Henry Trengrouse, Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, and Trevithick. It has sent forth at least one notable painter, the miner's boy Opie, and a dramatist, Samuel Foote, and a great singer in his day, Incledon. But it has not given to literature a great poet. Minor rhymes have been produced in great quantities, but none of great worth. Philosophers have issued from the mines, as Samuel Drew, eccentrics many, as Sir James Tillie, John Knill, and Daniel Gumb. And Cornwall has contributed a certain number of rascals—but fewer in number than almost any other county, if we exclude wreckers and smugglers from the catalogue of rascality.
Strange superstitions have lingered on, and one very curious story of a girl fed for years by fairies has been put on record.
It is somewhat remarkable that Cornwall has produced no musical genius of any note; and yet the Cornishman is akin to the Welshman and the Irishman.
Cornwall has certainly sent up to London and Westminster very able politicians, as Godolphin, Sir William Molesworth, and Sir John Eliot. It furnished Tyburn with a victim—Hugh Peters, the chaplain of Oliver Cromwell, a strange mixture of money-grasping, enthusiasm, and humour.
It has been the object of the author, not to retell the lives of the greatest of the sons of Cornwall, for these lives may be read in the Dictionary of National Biography, but to chronicle the stories of lesser luminaries concerning whom less is known and little is easily accessible. In this way it serves as a companion volume to Devonshire Characters; and Cornwall in no particular falls short of Devonshire in the variety of characters it has sent forth, nor are their stories of less interest.
The author and publisher have to thank many for kind help: Mr. Percy Bate, Mr. T. R. Bolitho, Rev. A. T. Boscawen, Mr. J. A. Bridger, Mr. T. Walter Brimacombe, Mr. A. M. Broadley, Mr. R. P. Chope, Mr. Digby Collins, Mr. J. B. Cornish, Mrs. Coryton of Pentillie Castle, Miss Loveday E. Drake, Mr. E. H. W. Dunkin, f.s.a., Mr. J. D. Enys of Enys, the Rev. Wm. Iago, Mrs. H. Forbes Julian, Mrs. de Lacy Lacy, the Rev. A. H. Malan, Mr. Lewis Melville, Mr. A. H. Norway, Captain Rogers of Penrose, Mr. Thomas Seccombe, Mr. Henry Trengrouse, Mr. W. H. K. Wright, and Mr. Henry Young of Liverpool—and last, but not least, Miss Windeatt Roberts for her admirable Index to the volume.
The publisher wishes me to say that he would much like to discover the whereabouts of a full-length portrait of Sir John Call, with a view of Bodmin Gaol in the background.
S. BARING-GOULD.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Thomas Pitt, Lord Camelford
Frontispiece
to face page
William Pengelly
2
From a painting by A. S. Cope, reproduced by permission of Mrs. H. Forbes Julian
Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Wills
12
From an engraving by Simon, after a picture by M. Dahl
A View of the Celebrated Logan Rock, near Land's End in Cornwall
18
Taken after the Rock was displaced on the 8th of April, 1824. From a lithograph by Vibert, after a drawing by Tonkin
A View of the Southern Part of Castle Treryn, showing the Machinery erected for the purpose of replacing the Logan Rock
22
From a lithograph by Vibert, after a drawing by Tonkin
Hugh Peters
26
From an old engraving
James Polkinghorne, the Famous Cornish Wrestler
54
From a drawing as he appeared in the Ring at Devonport on Monday, 23 October, 1826, when he threw Aḇͫ. Cann, the Champion of Devonshire, for a stake of 200 sovereigns
Henry Trengrouse, the Inventor of the Rocket Apparatus for Saving Life at Sea
60
From an oil painting by Opie the younger, reproduced by permission of Mr. H. Trengrouse
The Wreck of the "Anson"
66
From a sketch by Mr. H. Trengrouse
"
Parson Rudall
"
72
From a painting in the possession of the Rev. S. Baring-Gould
John Couch Adams
84
From a mezzotint by Samuel Cousins, a.r.a., after a picture by Thomas Mogford. From the collection of Mrs. Lewis Lane
John Couch Adams
88
The Cheese-wring
92
From an etching by Letitia Byrne, after a drawing by J. Farington, r.a.
Nevill Norway
118
From a painting in the possession of Miss A. T. Norway
Sir William Lower
126
The Killygrew Cup
134
"1633. from maior to maior to the towne of permarin, where they received mee that was in great misery"Jane Killygrew
This cup has been recently valued at the sum of £4000. It measures just two feet in height
George Carter Bignell
142
From a photograph
John Ralfs
146
Reproduced by permission of Miss Loveday E. Drake
Sir John Call, Bart.
154
From a portrait (by A. Hickle) in the possession of his great-granddaughter, Mrs. de Lacy Lacy
Whiteford—the Residence of Sir John Call
164
From a drawing in the possession of Mrs. de Lacy Lacy
John Knill
170
After a picture by Opie in the possession of Captain Rogers, of Penrose
Glass inscribed "Success to the Eagle Frigate, John Knill, Commander"
172
From the collection of Percy Bate, Esq., of Glasgow
Anthony Payne
182
From a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller, purchased by Sir Robert Harvey, High Sheriff of Cornwall, 1901, and presented to the Institute of Cornwall
Nevil Northey Burnard
186
From a bas-relief by the sculptor himself, in the possession of S. Pearn, Esq., Altarnon
Wesley's Head over the Old Meeting-house, Penpont, Altarnon.
Cut by Burnard when 16 years of age
188
Tombstones cut by Burnard
188
That on the right is upon the grave of his grandfather in Altarnon Churchyard, and was cut when the sculptor was only 14 years old; the one on the left is in Bodmin Churchyard
Tombstones in Altarnon Churchyard.
Cut by Burnard
190
Sir Goldsworthy Gurney
192
From a lithograph by W. Sharp, after a drawing by S. C. Smith
Dorothy Pentreath of Mousehole in Cornwall. The last Person who could Converse in the Cornish Language
232
From a drawing by R. Scadden
Monschole, in Mount's Bay, from the Island
238
From a drawing by Captain Tremenhere
Samuel Foote
280
The Last Lord Mohun
298
From a mezzotint by I. Faber, after a picture by Sir Godfrey Kneller
The Duel between Lord Mohun and the Duke of Hamilton
312
From a contemporary mezzotint in the British Museum
Sir William Noye, Attorney-General to King Charles the First
330
Sir William Lemon, Bart., M.P. for Cornwall
342
From an engraving by J. H. Meyer
Samuel Drew
346
From an engraving by R. Hicks, after a painting by F. Moore
Henry Rogers, Pewterer
364
Charles Incledon, as Macheath
376
From an engraving by J. Thomson, after a painting by Singleton
Sir James Tillie, Knt.
400
Sir James Tillie's Monument at Pentillie
406
Edward John Trelawny
442
From a drawing by D. Lucas
James Silk Buckingham
456
Mrs. Davenport, in the Character of Mrs. Grundy
466
From an engraving by Ridley, after a picture by De Wilde
At Prussia Cove. "Bessy's" Cove from Battery Point
470
From a drawing in the possession of J. B. Cornish, Esq.
John Carter's House at Prussia Cove. (Demolished in 1906)
476
From a photograph by Gibson & Sons, Penzance
Vice-Admiral Sir Charles V. Penrose, k.c.b.
500
From a picture by Allingham
Thomas Killigrew, Groom of the Bedchamber to King Charles the Second
544
From an engraving by I. Vander vaart, after a picture by W. Wissens
Lieutenant Philip Gidley King
560
From an engraving by W. Skelton, after a drawing by J. Wright
William R. Hicks
570
William R. Hicks of Bodmin
576
From a Caricature
John Thomas, otherwise Sir William Courtenay, who shot Lieutenant Bennet in Basenden Wood, Boughton, near Canterbury, and the Constable Mears, on Thursday, May 31st, 1838.
594
Percy Honeywood Courtenay, Knight of Malta, etc. etc., as he appeared at the Election in 1832
608
Mary Kelynack
620
Captain W. Rogers
624
From an engraving by Ridley and Blood, after a picture by Drummond
John Burton of Falmouth
628
Sir Cloudesley Shovel
638
Ann Glanville
664
Davies Gilbert
676
From a mezzotint by Samuel Cousins, a.r.a., after a picture by Henry Howard, r.a. From the collection of Mrs. Lewis Lane
John Harris, the Miner Poet
692
The Right Hon. John Earl of Radnor: Baron Roberts of Truro
718
After Sir Godfrey Kneller
Memorial Brass in the Church of Landulph
728
Reproduced by permission of E. H. W. Dunkin, Esq., f.s.a., from his book on Cornish Brasses
CORNISH CHARACTERS AND STRANGE EVENTS
CORNISH CHARACTERS
AND STRANGE EVENTS
WILLIAM PENGELLY, GEOLOGIST
William Pengelly was born at East Looe on January 12th, 1812, and was the son of the captain of a small coasting vessel and nephew of a notorious smuggler. The Pengellys had, in fact, been connected with the sea for several generations. His mother was a Prout of the same family as the famous water-colour artist.
As a child his career was almost cut short by fire. An aunt came to stay with the Pengellys, arriving a day before she was expected. Early on the following morning, when sitting in her bedroom window, wrapped in a thick woollen shawl, she saw her little nephew William rush out of the house enveloped in flames. She hurried after him, and managed to smother the fire with her woollen garment, and thus saved the child's life, though she was herself so badly burnt that she carried the scars to her dying day. The little boy had risen early, and had kindled a fire so that he might go on with his lessons before any one else was astir in the house, with the result that he set light to his clothes, and except for the premature arrival of his aunt, must certainly have been burnt to death.
At the age of twelve he went to sea. He says:—
"Our voyages were short. I do not remember an instance of being at sea more than three consecutive days; so that, except when windbound, we were almost always taking in or taking out cargo. The work was hard, but the food was abundant, and on the whole the life, though rough, was not unpleasant.
"To me—thinking nothing of the pecuniary aspects of the question—the most enjoyable occasions were those which fierce contrary winds brought us, when we had to seek some harbour of refuge. These were by no means necessarily holidays, for, if the weather were dry, advantage was taken of the enforced leisure to give our craft a thorough cleaning, or to repair her rigging, or to make up the books. Moreover, the crew employed me to write letters to their wives from their dictation. These epistles were generally of a remarkable character, and some of them remain firmly fixed in my memory. The foregoing labours disposed of, and foul winds still prevailing, we had a washing day, or, better than all, a bout of tailoring, which did not generally get beyond repairing, though occasionally the ambitious flight of making a pair of trousers was attempted. On tailoring days it was understood that my clothes should be repaired for me, in order that I might read aloud for the general benefit. We assembled in our little cabin, where the stitching and smoking went on simultaneously, and with great vigour. My poor library consisted of a Bible, the eighth volume of the Spectator, Johnson's English Dictionary, a volume of the Weekly Miscellany, the History of John Gilpin, Baron Munchausen's Travels, Walkinghame's Arithmetic, and a book of songs. My hearers were not very fastidious, but allowed me to read pretty much what I pleased, though, truth to tell, the Spectator was not a favourite; some portions of it were held to be nonsensical, and others were considered to be so lacking in truthfulness that it was generally termed the 'lying book.' This ill repute was largely due to the story of Fadlallah (No. 578). Walkinghame was by no means unpopular. I occasionally read some of the questions, and my shipmates endeavoured to solve them mentally; and as the answers were all given by the author, I had to declare who had made the nearest guess, for it was very often but little more. Of all the questions, none excited so much interest as that which asks, What will be the cost of shoeing a horse at a farthing for the first nail, two for the second, and so on in geometrical progression for thirty-two nails, and which gives for the answer a sum but little short of four and a half million pounds sterling. This was so utterly unexpected that it went far to confer on Walkinghame the same name that Fadlallah had given to the Spectator."
Reproduced by permission of Mrs. H. Forbes Julian
William Pengelly tells a curious story of his father, Richard Pengelly:—
"After completing his fifteenth year he was thinking of going to sea. When he was sixteen, his father, who was a sailor, was drowned almost within sight of his home. The effect on the boy was to make him pause, and on his friends, to urge him to give up the idea. For some months these influences kept him quiet, but at length his restlessness returned so strongly, that he would have gone to sea at once, had he felt satisfied that his father would have approved the step. To ascertain this point he prayed frequently and earnestly that his father's spirit might be allowed to appear to him, with a pleasing or frowning aspect, according as he might approve or disapprove. At length he believed his prayer to have been answered, and that when in the field ploughing he saw his father, who passed by looking intently and smilingly at him. This decided him. He became a sailor at seventeen, and as such died at a good old age."
One bitterly cold night at sea, young Pengelly and some other of his shipmates having closed the cabin door, lit a charcoal fire, and speedily fell asleep, succumbing to the fumes of carbonic acid. Happily one of the crew who had been on deck entered the cabin. He found the greatest difficulty in awakening his comrades to sufficient consciousness to enable them to stumble up the ladder to get a breath of fresh air, for their sleep had well-nigh become that of death. The strong and hardy seamen soon recovered, but the boy was so seriously affected that, long after he had been carried upon deck, he could not be roused, and was only restored to consciousness by means of prolonged exertions on the part of his shipmates. His earliest geological experience was made when a sailor-boy weather-bound on the Dorsetshire coast, and he was wont to relate it thus:—
"I received my first lesson in geology at Lyme Regis, very soon after I had entered my teens. A labourer, whom I was observing, accidentally broke a large stone of blue lias and thus disclosed a fine ammonite —the first fossil of any kind that I had ever seen or heard of.
"In reply to my exclamation, 'What's that?' the workman said, with a sneer, 'If you had read your Bible you'd know what 'tis.' 'I have read my Bible. But what has that to do with it?'
"'In the Bible we're told there was once a flood that covered all the world. At that time all the rocks were mud, and the different things that were drowned were buried in it, and there's a snake that was buried that way. There are lots of 'em, and other things besides, in the rocks and stones hereabouts.'
"'A snake! But where's his head?'
"'You must read the Bible, I tell 'ee, and then you'll find out why 'tis that some of the snakes in the rocks ain't got no heads. We're told there, that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head, that's how 'tis.'"
When in his sixteenth year William Pengelly lost his younger brother, and after that his mother would not suffer him to go to sea. Some years were spent at Looe in self-education.
While still quite young he was induced by a relative of his mother to settle at Torquay, at that time a small place, but rapidly growing and attracting residents to it. Here he opened a small day-school on the Pestalozzian system, and was one of the first to introduce the use of the blackboard and chalk. The school opened with six scholars, but rapidly increased to about seventy.
It was now that scientific studies began to occupy Pengelly's attention, and above all, geology.
In 1837 he married Mary Anne Mudge, whose health was always delicate.
Little by little his renown as a geologist spread, and he did not confine himself to the deposits in Devonshire, but travelled to Scotland and elsewhere to examine the rocks, and to meet and consult with eminent scientists.
In 1846 his private pupils had grown so numerous that he was able to give up his school altogether and become a tutor of mathematics and the natural sciences. He tells a very amusing story of a visit made during holiday time to an old friend.
"I one day learned that my road lay within a couple of miles of the rectory of my old mathematical friend D——. We had been great friends when he was a curate in a distant part of the country, but had not met for several years, during which he had been advanced from a curacy of about £80 to a rectory of £200 per year, and a residence, in a very secluded district. My time was very short, but for 'auld lang syne' I decided to sacrifice a few hours. On reaching the house Mr. and Mrs. D—— were fortunately at home, and received me with their wonted kindness.
"The salutations were barely over, when I said—
"'It is now six o'clock; I must reach Wellington tonight, and as it is said to be fully eight miles off, and I am utterly unacquainted with the road, and with the town when I reach it, I cannot remain with you one minute after eight o'clock.'
"'Oh, very well,' said D——, 'then we must improve the shining hour. Jane, my dear, be so good as to order tea.'
"Having said this he left the room. In a few minutes he returned with a book under his arm and his hands filled with writing materials, which he placed on the table. Opening the book, he said—
"'This is Hind's Trigonometry, and here's a lot of examples for practice. Let us see which can do the greatest number of them by eight o'clock. I did most of them many years ago, but I have not looked at them since. Suppose we begin at this one'—which he pointed out—'and take them as they come. We can drink our tea as we work, so as to lose no time.'
"'All right,' said I; though it was certainly not the object for which I had come out of my road.
"Accordingly we set to work. No words passed between us; the servant brought in the tray, Mrs. D—— handed us our tea, which we drank now and then, and the time flew on rapidly. At length, finding it to be a quarter to eight—
"'We must stop,' said I, 'for in a quarter of an hour I must be on my road.'
"'Very well. Let us see how our answers agree with those of the author.'
"It proved that he had correctly solved one more than I had. This point settled, I said 'Good-bye.'
"'Good-bye. Do come again as soon as you can. The farmers know nothing whatever about Trigonometry.'
"We parted at the rectory door, and have never met since; nor shall we ever do so more, as his decease occurred several years ago. During my long walk to Wellington my mind was chiefly occupied with the mental isolation of a rural clergyman."
In 1851 he lost his wife, and some years after both his children by her.
In 1853 he married a Lydia Spriggs, a Quakeress.
William Pengelly's scientific explorations may be divided under three heads. The first was his minute and accurate examination of the deposits that form Bovey Heathfield, where there are layers of clay, sand, and lignite. He was able to extract numerous fossil plants, and thereby to determine the approximate age of the beds.
Next he took up the exploration of ossiferous caves; and he began this work with that of Brixham, in Windmill Hill.
The floor of this cavern was excavated in successive stages or layers, starting from the entrance. Bones were found in the stalagmite and in the first, third, and fourth beds, and worked flints in the third and fourth beds only; but where the third bed filled the cavern up to the rock, its upper portion contained neither bones nor flints. The bones were those of the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the urus, hyæna, cave lion and cave bear, etc.
But by far the most laborious scientific undertaking of Pengelly's life was the exploration of Kent's Cavern, near Torquay. This cave was known as far back as 1824, when a Mr. Northmore, of Cleve, near Exeter, made a superficial examination of it to ascertain whether it had been a temple of Mithras, and quite satisfied himself on this point. He was followed by Sir W. C. Trevelyan and by the Rev. J. MacEnery. But it was not till 1865 that a complete, scientific, and exhaustive exploration was undertaken by the British Association, which made a grant of £100 for the purpose. Mr. Pengelly was appointed secretary and reporter to the committee for the examination of the cave and its deposits.
It was found that the floor of the cave exhibited the following succession: (1) Blocks of limestone sometimes large, clearly fallen from the roof. (2) A layer of black mould ranging from a few inches to upwards of a foot in depth. (3) Beneath this came a floor of granular stalagmite, about a foot in thickness, formed by the drip of water from the roof. (4) A red loam containing a number of limestone fragments. (5) A breccia of angular fragments of limestone and pebbles and sandstone embedded in a reddish sandy calcareous paste.
On June 19th, 1880, the exploration of Kent's Hole was brought to an end. It was the most complete and systematic investigation of a cavern that had ever been undertaken, and on a much greater scale than that at Brixham. A task of this kind is peculiarly exacting. It cannot be entrusted to workmen; it cannot be left to a committee whose members pay but intermittent visits: it demands the constant oversight of one man; and this superintendence was given to Pengelly. The total amount spent on this exploration was £2000. Pengelly states in one of his papers that in the fifteen and a quarter years during which the excavation was in progress he visited Kent's Hole almost daily, and spent over the work, on an average, five hours a day.
"Above the stalagmite, and principally in the black mould, have been found a number of relics belonging to different periods, such as socketed celts, and a socketed knife of bronze, and some small fragments of roughly smelted copper, about four hundred flint flakes, cores, and chips, a polishing stone, a ring (made of Kimmeridge clay), numerous spindle whorls, bone instruments terminating in comb-like ends, pottery, marine shells, numerous mammalian bones of existing species, and some human bones, on which it has been thought there are traces indicative of cannibalism. Some of the pottery is distinctly Roman in character; but many of the objects belong, no doubt, to pre-Roman times."
What was found beneath the stalagmite belonged to a long anterior period, where it had lain sealed up for, at the very least, two thousand years. In this deposit of the cave earth were found a large number of chips, flakes, and implements of flint and chert, stones that had served as pounders, and some pins, needles, and harpoons of bone.
Some mammoth bones were found in Kent's Cavern, and those of the cave lion, the sabre-toothed tiger, the glutton, cave bear, woolly rhinoceros, horse, reindeer, and beaver.
Mr. W. Pengelly died on March 17th, 1894.
A writer in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association for 1894 says: "For science he lived, and for science he laboured, even long after the age when the average man seeks rest and quiet. Starting out in original lines of thought, and untrammelled by traditions of years long ago, he met with many rebuffs, and the conclusions which he derived from his investigations and minute and patient inquiry were almost laughed to scorn. But he adhered to his work and clung to his beliefs, with enthusiastic devotion, and in the end he lived to see even those who had originally stoutly opposed his views convinced of their verity, and their inestimable value to archæological and geological science."
Pengelly himself left this piece of advice to the student:—
"Be careful in scientific inquiries that you get a sufficient number of perfectly trustworthy facts[1q]; that you interpret them with the aid of a rigorous logic; that on suitable occasions you have courage enough to avow your convictions; and don't be impatient, or annoyed, if your friends don't receive all your conclusions, or even if they call you bad names."
It must be remembered that Pengelly and Sir Charles Lyell were those who startled English minds with the revelation of the enormous period of time in which man had lived on the earth, and of the slow progression of man through vast ages in the development of civilization. How that he began with the rudest flint implements, and progressed but very slowly to the perfection of these stone tools; how that only in comparatively recent times did he discover the use of metals and pottery; how of metals he first employed bronze, and not till long after acquired the art of smelting iron and fashioning tools and weapons of iron. All this startled the world, and men were very unwilling to accept the doctrine propounded and to acknowledge the facts on which this doctrine was based.
The Life of William Pengelly was written by his daughter Hester Pengelly, and published by Murray, 1897. Reference has been made as well to the obituary notice in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association for 1894.
SIR CHARLES WILLS, K.B.
Sir Charles Wills belonged to a very ancient and widely ramified family in Cornwall. The first, however, of whom anything authentic is known was Anthony Wills, of Saltash, who died in 1576. They were settled at Landrake, at Morval, Botusfleming, Wyvelscombe, Exeter, and Gorran.
Anthony Wills, of Gorran, youngest son of Digory Wills, of Botusfleming, had a son, Anthony Wills, who was the father of the Right Hon. Sir Charles Wills, k.b., general of His Majesty's forces, baptized at Gorran 23rd October, 1666. Sir Charles had two brothers, Richard, of Acombe, in the county of York, and Anthony, of the Inner Temple, who died in Ireland 1689. The arms of the family are, arg. three griffins passant, in pale, sa., within a bordure engrailed of the last besantée.
Sir Charles was a subaltern in 1693, when serving in the Low Countries under William III. The King went to Holland at the end of March in that year, and returned on the last day of October, when the armies went into winter quarters. Wills was in the battle of Landen and at the siege of Namur. On the 13th October, 1705, he was appointed colonel of the 30th Regiment, and sailed with it to Spain. He acted as quartermaster-general to the troops in that country, was present at Llenda, Almanza, and Saragossa, and was made prisoner in 1711 with the army under General Stanhope, but was released at the end of the war.
Lieutenant General Wills Commander of his Maj.ties Forces in the Action against the Rebells at Preston in Lancashire.
He had been appointed brigadier-general in 1707, major-general on 1st January, 1709, and lieutenant-general 16th November, 1710. After the peace of 1715, being in command of the troops in the Midland district, he marched northwards to meet the rebels from Scotland, and he and General Carpenter met them at Preston. Preston was a town both Jacobite and Roman Catholic; and in it was the army of the Pretender, composed of Scottish Highlanders and Lancashire gentry and their retainers.
General Carpenter, who had been marching into Scotland, turned back into Northumberland, and by forced marches had reached Durham, where he combined with General Wills, who had been sent some time before into the north to quell the many riots that preluded the insurrection.
Wills concentrated six regiments of cavalry, for the most part newly raised, but commanded by experienced officers, at Manchester, whence he moved to Wigan. There it was arranged that Wills should march straight upon Preston, while Carpenter, advancing in another direction, should take the insurgents in flank. As the Hanoverians approached, General Forster, who commanded the Jacobites, gave satisfactory evidence that he was no soldier; he fell into a fright and confusion, and betook himself to bed. But Lord Kenmure roused him, and in a hurried council, where all the gentlemen had a voice, and where those spoke loudest who knew least of war, a plan of defending Preston was adopted. But the plan, at least as executed, consisted merely in throwing up some barricades in the streets and in posting some men in defence of them. Brigadier Mackintosh either knew not the ground or his better judgment was overruled; for Preston offered many advantages as a defensive position which were altogether neglected. In front of the town was a bridge over the Ribble, that might have been held by a handful of men, and from the bridge to the town, for a distance of a mile, the road ran through a hollow between steep banks for a mile. But river, bridge, and road were all left undefended. When Wills rode up to the bridge and saw that it was unprotected he could hardly believe his eyes; and then he concluded that the insurgents must have abandoned Preston and begun their retreat into Scotland, so that there would be no fighting that day.
But as he came to the outskirts of the town, he heard a tumultuous noise within, and saw the barricades that Forster had thrown up, and was saluted by a shower of bullets. He ordered his dragoons to dismount and attack two of the barricades. This service was gallantly performed; but the regulars were sorely galled by a fire from the houses as well as from the barricades.
As night was falling Wills withdrew his men, after they had suffered considerable loss. Early on the following morning General Carpenter came up with a part of his cavalry; and then Forster, who had scarcely lost a man, and whose force more than doubled that of the regular troops, lost heart entirely, and without consulting his friends, sent Colonel Oxburgh to propose a capitulation.
General Wills, irritated at the loss he had sustained on the preceding evening, seemed at first disposed to reject the proposition altogether; but at last he agreed "that, if the rebels would lay down their arms and surrender at discretion, he would protect them from being cut to pieces by the soldiers, until further orders from the Government."
When Oxburgh's mission was known in the town, and the result of it, the more warlike portion of the insurgents were indignant and railed against the coward Forster; and so incensed were they against him that, according to an eye-witness, if he had ventured into the street, he would infallibly have been torn to pieces.
The brave Highlanders, seeing that nothing was to be expected from the Lancastrian boors who had joined them, proposed rushing with sword in hand and cutting their way through the King's troops. But their leaders thought this too hazardous a proceeding and counselled surrender. They gave up Lord Derwentwater and Colonel Mackintosh as hostages, and induced the clans to lay down their arms and submit. Including English and Scotch, only seventeen men had been killed in the defence of Preston.
The Lancastrian peasants got away out of the town, but fourteen hundred men were made prisoners by a thousand, or at the outside twelve hundred English horse. Among those captured were Lords Derwentwater, Widdrington, Nithsdale, Winton, Carnwark, Kenmure, Nairn, and Charles Murray. There were others, members of ancient and honourable families of the north, of Scotland, and of Lancashire.
The invasion of England by the Jacobites had thus ended ingloriously. The noblemen and gentlemen of rank and influence who were taken were sent to London in charge of Brigadier Panter and a hundred men of Lumley's Horse.
On January 5th, 1716, Wills was appointed to the colonelcy of the 3rd Regiment of the line, and on the death of Lord Cadogan was transferred in August, 1726, to that of the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards.
It was customary at all times for the King's company of the 1st Guards to fly the Royal Standard, which was carried by that company on all state occasions. It was of crimson silk throughout, with the King's cypher and crown in the middle and the arms of the three kingdoms quartered in the four corners. The staff of this standard was also more ornamented than that of the other twenty-seven companies. The lieutenant-colonel's colours were also of crimson silk throughout. These colours were renewed every seven years.
In 1723 the King went to Hanover, when a camp was formed in Hyde Park under the command of Lieut.-Colonel Wills. He had been elected M.P. for Totnes in 1714, and he represented that borough till 1741. In 1725 he was made Knight of the Bath and Privy Councillor.
In 1733, in consequence of the increase of smuggling carried on even in London, Strickland, Secretary for War, addressed a letter in the form of a warrant to the Governor of the Tower and to the officers in command of the Guards, authorizing them to furnish detachments of men to assist in securing contraband goods; and in consequence of the increase of the duties to be performed by the men of the Foot Guards, their establishment was raised in 1739 by ten men per company.
In 1740, as the political horizon on the Continent was threatening, Walpole had to choose between declaring war with Spain and resigning. He disapproved of war, but rather than resign declared it. The people of London were delighted and rang the bells in the steeples. "Ah!" said Walpole; "they are ringing the bells now; they soon will be wringing their hands." Camps, in anticipation of hostilities, were ordered to be formed in various parts of England. In March orders were conveyed to Sir Charles Wills and others to direct their officers to provide themselves with tents and everything needful for encamping, and those troops under Sir Charles were to occupy Hounslow. He superintended the formation of the camp where the whole of the Horse and Foot Guards were to assemble, and previous to departing they paraded in Hyde Park, on June 15th, under Sir Charles, who had a lieutenant-general and a major-general on the staff with him. Thence he proceeded to the encampment on the Heath marked out for the purpose.
The twenty-four companies of the 1st Guards under the command of Colonel Richard Ingoldsby, second major of the regiment, remained encamped on Hounslow from June 16th for several months—in fact, till the middle of October.
Sir Charles Wills was now filling the post of General Commander of the King's forces, but had been failing in health and strength, and soon became quite unable to take any active work; and he died on December 25th, Christmas Day, 1741, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
He had never been married. He had purchased land at Claxton, and this and all he had he bequeathed to Field-Marshal Sir Robert Rich, Bart., of Roxhill, in Suffolk, Governor of Chelsea Hospital.
LIEUTENANT GOLDSMITH AND THE LOGAN ROCK
In the parish of S. Levan is a promontory running out into the sea, once cut off by embankments on the land side, and converted into a cliff castle, that bears the name of Trereen-Dinas. The headland presents a succession of natural piles of granite tors, the first of which, rising perpendicularly, is crowned by the far-famed Logan Rock, a mass weighing about ninety tons, and so exactly poised upon one point that any one, by applying his shoulder to it, could make the whole mass rock sensibly. Not only so, but in a high wind it could be seen rolling on its pivot.
Doctor Borlase, in his Antiquities of Cornwall, 1754, says: "In the parish of S. Levan, Cornwall, there is a promontory called Castle Treryn. This cape consists of three distinct groupes of rocks. On the western side of the middle groupe, near the top, lies a very large stone, so evenly poised, that any hand may move it to and fro; but the extremities of its base are at such a distance from each other, and so well secured by their nearness to the stone which it stretches itself upon, that it is morally impossible that any lever, or indeed force (however applied in a mechanical way), can remove it from its present situation."
This overbold statement, added to the persistence of the people of the neighbourhood, that no man could throw the Logan Rock from its balance, stirred up a silly young lieutenant, Hugh Colvill Goldsmith, of H.M.S. cutter Nimble, on the preventive service, lying off the Land's End on the look-out for smugglers, to attempt to do what the popular voice declared to be impossible. Lieut. Goldsmith was a nephew of the famous Oliver Goldsmith, and had consequently some flighty Irish blood in his veins.
A VIEW OF THE CELEBRATED LOGAN ROCK, NEAR LAND'S END IN CORNWALLTaken after the Rock was displaced on the 8th of April, 1824
"On April 8, 1824," says the Gentleman's Magazine, "a party of sailors belonging to H.M. cutter Nimble, commanded by Lieut. Goldsmith, came on shore for the purpose of removing from its situation that great curiosity the Logging (rocking) Stone; and which object they were unfortunately enabled to accomplish. This mass of granite, which is nearly 100 tons weight, was one of the three objects that excited the curiosity of every visitor to the west part of Cornwall. It stood on the summit of a mass of rocks at the Land's End, and was so poised on a natural pivot, that the force which a man could exert was sufficient to cause it to vibrate. In this situation it remained from a period anterior to our authentic records, as it is noticed by our earliest writers, until the barbarian above mentioned, in sheer wantonness, removed it from its place. This act of vandalism has excited the greatest indignation at Penzance, as it will in every part of Cornwall, and throughout the kingdom. It appears that Lieut. Goldsmith landed at the head of fourteen of his men, and with the assistance of handspikes and a handscrew, called by the sailors jack-in-the-box, with much labour and perseverance threw over the stone. What renders the act most atrocious is, that two poor families, who derived a subsistence from attending visitors to the stone, are now deprived of the means of support."
It was found that the handspikes and jack were of no avail. Accordingly Goldsmith made his fourteen men put their shoulders to the stone and bring it into such violent oscillation that at last it toppled over.
The Logan Stone, thus displaced, would have rolled down from the tor on which it had rested and have shot into the sea, had it not happily been arrested by a cleft in the rock.
The indignation of the people was great, so that the life of Lieut. Goldsmith was threatened by the sturdy fishermen, should he land. But the desire to land was taken from him, for the whole county was roused, and a gathering of the magistrates was summoned to consider what could be done, and to memorialize the Admiralty against the perpetrator of this wanton act of mischief.
Happily Mr. Davies Gilbert was at the time in London, and he at once proceeded to the Admiralty and complained of the vandalism perpetrated, and requested that the lieutenant should be ordered to replace the block as found, and that the proper apparatus, capstan, blocks, chains, etc., should be furnished by the dockyard at Devonport.
This was undertaken, and orders were despatched to Lieut. Goldsmith that he must either restore the Logan Rock to its old position, at his own cost, or forfeit his commission. As the expense would be wholly beyond his means, Mr. Davies Gilbert very liberally subscribed £150 for the purpose.
A writer, Lieut. L. Edye, in the Western Antiquary for 1887, says: "In his trouble he appealed to my grandfather (Mr. William Edye) for advice and assistance, stating that the Admiralty had called upon him either to replace the stone or forfeit his commission. My grandfather, ever ready to render assistance to any one in trouble, readily assisted, and having travelled into Cornwall (as a friend) and seen the damage done, applied to the Admiralty for the loan of plant and men. Their Lordships complied with the request, but stipulated that the cost must be entirely defrayed by Lieut. Goldsmith."
We will now see what Goldsmith had to say for himself. The following is an extract from a letter written by him to his mother, dated April 24th, 1824:—
