A treasure of such value demanded special precautions for its safe keeping. It was stored in a chamber cut in the solid rock which forms the hillside on which the town of Falmouth lies. This chamber was lined with sheet iron, and its doors were of oak strongly bound with iron bars. Here the treasure lay in absolute safety until arrangements could be made for conveying it to London. It travelled by vehicles which are yet well remembered in Cornwall, and which, in their day, constituted one of the chief modes of communication between London and the West of England. Russell’s wagons were indeed travelling upon the Great West Road before the first mail coach bowled out of London; and as the passenger fares by the “Highflyer” or the “Rocket” were beyond the means of poor people, there were always some, even until the days of railways, who preferred to journey with the wagons, sleeping by night beneath the tilt, and trudging all day beside the wagoner’s pony. There was no difficulty in keeping pace; for the rate did not exceed two, or at most three, miles an hour. The horses never trotted; the progress was a sort of stroll. Inside the wagon rode a man armed with pistol and blunderbuss. The drivers were provided with horse pistols, and, when treasure was in the wagons, a guard of soldiers marched up to London with them, one on either side, two in the rear, to guard against surprise.
The roads were unsafe enough in old days, but there is no memory of any attack upon Russell’s wagons; though a tradition lingers that such a venture was once planned, but frustrated by a dream which revealed the robbers’ plot. Hardly fifty years have passed since these old wagons might still have been met, toiling at their leisurely pace along the western road. But the new railway was fast devouring the country; the busy inns were closing one by one; that great silence was falling over the country roads which has lasted until now. The passengers went by train; the specie no longer came to Falmouth. The old wagons had had a long day, but it was past; and they went the way of other anachronisms. The illustration which faces this page shows perhaps more clearly than any description, the picturesqueness of this phase of by-gone life.
It was not with the wagons that the change in progress either began or ended. The construction of railways was changing the face of England, robbing certain districts of their old importance, and raising others to a consequence which they had never before enjoyed. The picturesque and busy life of Falmouth was doomed. The same silence was fast stealing over the port and town as had settled on the country roads. The townsmen fought hard and long to retain their ancient Service, but the spirit of the age was too strong for them. Bit by bit the Packets were removed to other ports, and an old and memorable chapter of our history was brought to a close.
CHAPTER II.
LAX ADMINISTRATION.
It may be that from the bird’s-eye view given in the previous chapter, the reader has gathered some impression of the magnitude of the Post-Office establishment at Falmouth, and of the strength and number of the ties which united it with the prosperity of that town.
To describe in similar detail the life of other Packet Stations would be tedious and useless; for no one of them could vie with the great Cornish seaport in any circumstance of interest. The Dover Station, whence the Calais Packets sailed, was closed during every French war. The Harwich, or Yarmouth boats, for they sailed during several years from the latter port, stood next to Falmouth in importance. They maintained the Postal Service for Holland and Northern Europe generally, sailing chiefly to the Brill and to Hamburg. Their voyages on the stormy North Sea were often dangerous; and were performed with great skill and hardihood, but with little variety of incident. It was not until the Continental System established by Napoleon began to force the exclusion of English vessels from every seaport which his hand could reach, and like a creeping paralysis, the hostile influence mounted steadily up the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic,—it was only then that the Harwich Packets began to serve as counters in a game of exceptional difficulty. The Holyhead Station confronted no dangers worth speaking of. The Milford Packets ran to Waterford, often making rough and troublesome passages, but offering very little detail worth recording. The boats between Portpatrick and Donaghadee were still less interesting.
In every sense Falmouth was the chief station. Nearly every vestige of interest connected with the ancient Mail Service centres there, and the Falmouth Packets may be regarded as the most perfect type of the Post-Office Establishment.
No account appears to be extant of the circumstances attending the institution in the year 1688 of a Service of Packets from Falmouth Harbour, but they may be easily surmised. For fourteen years the communications were with Corunna alone. It could scarcely have been for the convenience of passengers that in those days of difficult roads, the most westerly port in England was chosen as the place of embarkation. The selection suggests that the Government were guided in their choice by the paramount necessity of quick passages, and the swift transmission of news; and this anxiety for haste is amply accounted for by the growing importance of Spanish politics at the time. Questions were indeed arising in that quarter of the world which were of vital consequence to England; and the Ministry in providing a means of forwarding and receiving despatches with regularity, were impelled by something like necessity.
The idea of a Regular Service of Packet boats, supported by the Government, was not a novel one. Such a Service had existed on the eastern coast of England from very early times; and in the Packets of Harwich or Dover a model for the new establishment was ready to hand. A somewhat different type of vessel was required for the Corunna voyage. The new Packets were considerably larger, nearly two hundred tons, while those serving in the North Sea did not usually exceed sixty tons. They were also more heavily armed, as became vessels which ventured further from the protection of English cruisers in the home waters, and carried a larger complement of men. They were hired under contract, and were not the property of the Post-Office, which, indeed, at no period of its administration, became the owner of the Packets, though the officers and men serving on them were from very early days the servants of the Postmaster General, not of the contractors.
It might have seemed more natural that the new Packets should sail from the same ports as the old ones, and be located on the east coast, where all the machinery needed for their administration was at work already. But it seems to have been recognized from the outset that for the Spanish Service that port was the most suitable which lay furthest to the west. Falmouth was chosen from the first, and though in the early years of the last century the contractors were occasionally allowed to despatch their boats from Plymouth, and even once or twice (under a strong representation of the danger of Privateers watching a known point of departure) from Bideford, the Postmaster General, as time went on, became less ready to fall in with the whims of these gentlemen, and the Service settled down regularly at Falmouth.